Twenty-third International Conference on Diversity in Organizations, Communities & Nations

Abstract

Gender based violence (GBV) has become a global problem. This has also resulted in local women movements across the world, and in Africa specifically, mobilizing themselves against the various forms of this problem and Ghana has not been an exception (Medie,2013). While many laws and regulations have been developed specifically to tackle this problem, a lot is still needed to end it. One of the main stakeholders in the fight against GBV is the media who act as both activists and serve as a platform through which people can be educated and given information about the problem. However, the media has often been blamed for overlooking, over-simplifying, under-reporting or wrongly reporting instances of gender-based violence in Ghana. This is a problem because when people are not properly educated or informed about the problem, their perceptions may be wrongly influenced, and this can affect the fight against the problem. This study examines how the media, specifically online news media reported instances of GBV between 2019 and 2022. Through a quantitative content analysis, GBV stories published on the leading online news portals in Ghana are considered for analysis. The study answers the following questions: 1. How did online media in Ghana cover news about GBV? 2. How frequently did online news media publish news about GBV in Ghana? 3. How did online news media in Ghana frame news about GBV?