Organizations in Middle East monitor media images of violence against women

ACT, a non-governmental organization, was founded in 1990 to work on the themes of gender and violence against women.Under the leadership of its Director ,Ms Azza Kamel, ACT’s mandate has since expanded to include media monitoring.Currently, the organization co-ordinates the Arab Network for Monitoring the Image of Women and Men in the Media which is active in several Middle East countries.

After participating in WACC’s Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) in 2005 and in the December 2006 workshop on Gender and Media Advocacy organized in Jordan by Ammanet (Arab Media Network for Human Development), ACT began a programme of training for non-governmental organizations to monitor gender representation and portrayal of violence against women in the mass media.

With support from WACC, in 2007 a similar training programme - this time specifically aimed at monitoring the mass media portrayal of rape and sexual harassment in Egyptian media - was started by ACT

One of the beneficiaries of the training programme is the Helwan Association for Community Development in west Cairo.Organised in the 1990’s as a women’s co-operative and a mini-enterprise to produce and sells crafts, the group now has 300 members.The founders were women survivors of domestic violence who came together at first as a women’s support group which then began to seek ways to earn a living for themselves and their children.

The group now networks with other women’s and civil society groups struggling for gender equality and legislation reform in the country.As part of their process of empowerment and awareness-raising, the group worked with ACT and learnt from them about WACC’s media monitoring programme.The Helwan group then encouraged ACT to begin monitoring the media and to use their experience in dealing with all forms of domestic violence in order to design a specific programme to monitor stories about gender-related violence in the mass media. Using monitoring forms designed by ACT, the Helwan group concentrates on the portrayal of violence against women in two of Cairo’s main newspapers, the dailies Al Ahram and Al Akhbar. The team that monitors the newspaper is made up of six women.The forms used by the six women doing the monitoring include technical data as well as their own interpretative reaction to the way the story has been written.Although not all the women in the cooperative participate in the monitoring, the six monitors, themselves members of the cooperative, rotate and therefore skills are reproduced as more women become involved and learn the monitoring methodology.

Other 2 groups, in different communities, participate in the project by monitoring the portrayal of women and violence in a highly popular TV drama while yet another group concentrates on magazines.

In March, the WACC staff liaison for the Middle East Region, María Teresa Aguirre, and a representative of the WACC-Middle East Regional Association, Amany Latif, had the opportunity to visit the group in the Helwan neighborhood of Cairo.There they met with Ms Zeinab Ali Abdul Latif, general director and founder of the group and some of the members of the monitoring team.During the visit, it became clear that the group not only gathers data on how the mass media portrays violence against women but also that this very act of monitoring produces other data, such as frequency of occurrence, age of victims, perpetrators, etc. all information which cannot be found easily anywhere else in official documents.

The visit to the WACC-supported monitoring project took place at the end of the annual meeting of the Executive Committee of the WACC-Middle East Regional Association.Among the items discussed during the two-day meeting held in Cairo between 9 and 11 March were the preparation and planning for the next tri-annual WACC-ME general assembly which will take place in early September 2008.The theme of the assembly will be the promotion of communication rights in the Middle East.

For more information on the work of ACT please contact:
Mrs. Azza Kamel
ACT
actegypt@yahoo.com

For more information on the WACC-Middle East Regional Association please contact
Dr Riad Jarjour
President WACC-ME Regional Association
riadjarjour@cyberia.net.lb