Systemic Gender Discrimination or Psychopathic Gangs? Media Representations of Femicide in Guatemala

The objective of this paper is to analyze the way that murders of women are represented in Guatemalan newspapers and how that representation has changed in response to women’s organizations’ efforts to bring a gendered analysis to the issue. For several decades women's organizations have argued that newspaper reports of murdered women use language that blames the victim, minimizes the problem, and deflects attention away from systemic gender violence within the family and other institutions by suggesting that the majority of murders are carried out by psychopathic youth gangs. In order to combat this representation of the problem they have conducted studies of violence against women, held press conferences reporting those results, worked on changing and introducing laws, and held workshops with the media in order to sensitize them about how they report these crimes.

For this analysis I use reports of murdered women, feature articles on gendered crimes, and articles reporting on the activities of women’s organizations for the last five years from the two Guatemalan newspapers with the largest circulation. I analyze the way that victims and perpetrators are represented, theories of causation offered by different social actors, how feminist language is used by these different actors and by the journalists, and the overall “moral of the story” that is being presented to the Guatemalan public. I compare this to the points of view of women’s organizations and human rights groups gleaned from their publications and interviews with key members. I argue that while there is more inclusion of feminist language and points of view in media reports, these are dwarfed by the daily barrage of murder reports that, with bare minimum descriptions and very little follow up, leave the Guatemalan public to fill in the blanks with their own interpretations of what is "really" going on.