A Closer Look At A New Report On Television Violence Against Women

The Mentalist is one of many crime-oriented shows that's become popular in recent years, but are women more likely than they used to be to show up as victims? (Richard Foreman / Warner Brothers)

by Linda Holmes

The Parents Television Council has been around a long time, and generally they put out press releases a couple of times a week in which they express displeasure with various things about television -- the language, the explicit content in a roast of Joan Rivers, that kind of thing. They tend to favor more regulation by Congress and the FCC, and they're big advocates of fining networks heavily for dropped swear words and so on.

Their new report yesterday caught my eye, though: it's a look at the change in televised violence against women between 2004 and 2009, and the headline is that the incidents they counted increased dramatically in that period.

At first, I wasn't the least bit surprised, given the boom in crime procedurals, but interestingly, they report that violence overall is only up two percent, while violence against women is up 120 percent. (You can read the PDF version of the study here.) So it's not just more shows with violence, it's more against women specifically.

The many caveats, after the jump.

There are, of course, all kinds of caveats to this study. First, they don't distinguish between fantasy, comedy, and drama, so punching a girl on The Simpsons is the same as brutally murdering someone on CSI. (In fact, they single out Fox comedies for criticism.) Second, whether you think this trend is either creatively or socially irritating is completely separate from whether you agree with where they want to go with the data, which is in the direction of more government regulation of content. Third, you're still looking at relatively small raw numbers in some cases, meaning that without more detail about which shows are involved, it's hard to tell exactly what's going on. Fourth, the definition of "violence" isn't precisely explained, so I'm not sure whether, for instance, grabbing someone by the arm is "violence."

And finally, I'm not quite clear on what they mean when they say they count "storylines" rather than incidents -- they point out that this means multiple incidents within the same storyline are only counted once, but it would also seem to mean that if somebody slaps somebody else on the arm, it might "contaminate" your entire storyline, meaning that additional complexity in storytelling might cause changes in the data simply because each storyline contains more content that might stumble into an act of "violence."

But it seems like these numbers are at least worth noticing. It may be that if you took apart the data and applied your own standards, you wouldn't find the increase to be quite as dramatic as they do, but if, in fact, "victimized woman" is getting significantly more play as a storyline than it did even five years ago, that's probably not great news, even just in the sense that it's a relatively cheap way to manufacture tension.