Episode 25: Conversation with Janey Starling, feminist, and singer from We Level Up Campaign
XiQi - Host for The View
Janey Starling - We Level Up
Xiqi - The View (00:00):
Hi everyone. Welcome to the View Magazine, Rebel Justice podcast. I am Xiqi, a student from Kings College London. I am the podcast presenter for today. Today we are honoured to have our podcast guest, Janey Starling.
Hi Janey. Welcome to today podcast. Can you tell us a bit about you?
Janey Starling - We Level up (00:18):
Hi. Thank you for having me. So, I am a feminist campaigner, and I am co-director of the UK Feminist Organization “Level Up”. We are currently campaigning to end prison sentencing for pregnant women, and one of our biggest campaigns has been to change the way that Fatal domestic abuse is reported in the press.
Xiqi - The View (00:36):
Great. Janey, can you tell me what your focus of study at the university and how it formed what you are doing today?
Janey Starling - We Level up (00:44):
Interesting question. So, I actually studied English literature, because I love books. I did a module on decolonial literature and that was what really politicized me. While I was at university, I was involved in kind of feminist organizing and feminist campaigns. So, it was more the stuff that I did outside of my course that really informed what I am doing today in terms of feminist activism because I think the best way to make change is by building power with other people and I had real good funding at university, so I continued.
Xiqi - The View (01:19):
Oh, that is interesting to hear. And you and your team at Level Up do the guidance for the media for reporting fatal domestic violence news. So, what motivated you to start this campaign?
Janey Starling - We Level up (01:32):
So, the Level Up team read all the papers every morning, and in the summer of 2018, we saw there were so many reports of women who had been murdered by their partners, but the way that they were reported was so undignified and disrespectful and also paid no attention to the broader context of the death. I am an expert in domestic abuse, I have been working in that sector for over a decade. When somebody kills their partner, it is usually the end point to a sustained period of coercive control where someone has abused somebody else and then normally that person, the victim will try and leave, and the perpetrator will then claim the ultimate act of control by killing them. But the way that the media has reported these deaths was as though the man had just flown into a jealous rage, that he just snapped, that he was devastated and then murdered her. And there was this really dangerous narrative, which was that, these men just love the women so much, they had to kill them, which is ridiculous. Like that doesn’t make any sense, but that was what the narrative was. So, we looked into it, and I thought, well, what are the regulations around reporting this kind of death because this is a public health issue.
What about suicide? There is very strict media code on how to report suicide. Why is there no code for reporting fatal domestic abuse? It is a public health problem. So, I spoke to the Samaritans, who have changed the way that suicide is reported in the press, and they said that they did it through creating guidelines and training journalists. So, we set about to do the same thing.
Xiqi - The View (03:13):
My next question is language is powerful, inappropriate word choices in the reporting can cause secondary trauma to victims and their families. What aspects of a case should the media pay attention to in order to avoid further harm? And how do you do this in your own work?
Janey Starling - We Level up (03:32):
The most important thing, and what we found with so many cases is that at the beginning, in the immediate aftermath of a murder, the press is scrambling for any information that they can find and that is when some of the most harmful behaviours happen. They will look on a victim’s Facebook to try and get a picture of her before the police have even released a picture. They will try and knock on the family’s door. They will really like, be very pushy and invasive when the family are experiencing an intense amount of grief and shock. And the most important thing more broadly is that the murder is contextualized within the broader relationship. So, it becomes, in the words of Luke and Ryan Hart, two brothers whose father murdered their mum, Claire and Sister Charlotte in 2016. They say that reports should be memorial for the victim and not propaganda for the perpetrator.
What we say to journalists when we are training them is, make sure you’re reporting with accuracy. Make sure, and that means that, you know, you’re talking about the broader context. You are saying that this wasn’t a one-off, there was a broader relationship to this. There was previous abuse. Images, make sure that the images that you’re using are dignified, that you send to the victim and not the perpetrator and that you use the image that the family has provided, not dig around to find something on Facebook. That you report with dignity because if you are sensationalizing or adding really violent details, you have to remember that this is a piece of coverage that their children are going to read again and again and again. And for so many people I’ve worked with who are domestic abuse survivors, whose mother or sister has been killed, it’s incredibly painful for them to see the public record of their mother or sister blaming her for her own death.
And finally, we asked them to report with accountability. Holding the perpetrator accountable. Making sure that they’re actually not using the passive voice, that they’re actually pointing the finger at the perpetrator and not blaming it on mental health, blaming it on lockdown or making up any other myths because ultimately men who kill women are exercising control. It is an active choice, and they need to be held accountable. So those A I D A, that, the acronym that we use in our journalist training and they’re the key points. They’re also featured in our media guidelines online. If you go to www.welevelup.org/media-guidelines, you’ll see all of this there.
Xiqi - The View (06:13):
Yeah, definitely going to check that later. So, what did you think of the way news about women with complex backgrounds who may not be perfect victims like Amber Heard is reported?
Janey Starling - We Level up (06:27):
That’s such a good question. I think there is no such thing as a perfect victim ever. It such a fairy tale myth and in the same way, there’s no such thing as a monster perpetrator. Men who are abusive are incredibly charming and are very good at managing their perception. They’re always in control, whether that’s through charm or violence. So, we need to not be looking for fairy tale, innocent, perfect, beautiful victims, and we also shouldn’t be looking for absolute awful monsters because we will never find either. And the reality is, that domestic abuse is extremely traumatizing. Survivors are doing everything that they can. Actually, I think something that, not spoken about enough is that survivors who are coping through very, very difficult situations, they are often using alcohol and drugs as a way to escape, and that is okay, like they are surviving. We need to see it in that context.
We need to see abuse as a crushing of someone’s spirit and a real, like just putting them into a shrinking box. Something we actually don’t talk about enough is domestic abuse related suicides where women end up taking their own life because they see that as the only way out. So, I think we have to disregard the concept of a perfect victim, and we also have to look at the power dynamics in a relationship. So, to give the example of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, he was significantly older than her. He had a lot more money than her. He had a lot bigger profile than her, and there’s a very clear power differential in there. Regardless of whether she screamed at him, that doesn’t change the power imbalance between them. And I think we need to look at abuse as a longstanding pattern of behaviours and a power dynamic rather than one-off incidents. Um, and once you look at the bigger picture, you can very much see that one person is in control and the other person is only trying to survive and respond and to sometimes take back some of the power and control, but ultimately, they never can.
Xiqi - The View (08:24):
Over 57% of women in prison are also victims of domestic abuse, and have long histories of trauma and violence, yet they’re portrayed in the press as evil, manipulative, and deserving of punishment. Over 80% of women in prison have two or more mental health conditions. What do you think about introducing guidelines about the way legal cases are reported?
Janey Starling - We Level up (08:49):
That’s such a great idea. I think there needs to be so much more trauma-informed reporting around cases. I definitely think court reporting is where so much harm is done, especially in fatal domestic abuse cases, but also in cases where, women are the defendants. I think because we live, and I know Helena Kennedy has written a lot about this because we live in this society of misogyny and where women are expected to be, there’s so many high expectations of women. It’s almost as though any woman who strays outside gender norms is doubly punished, so, I think this real like sense of women who are evil and manipulative and need to be punished, is totally removed from their context, from their trauma and ultimately it moves us further away from a criminal justice system that is actually grounded in compassion and rehabilitation because prison doesn’t solve anything. If it did, then we wouldn’t need them anymore. It ultimately serves the government, security and surveillance agenda, but it doesn’t prevent harm from happening. It doesn’t keep us safe and when it comes to the women prisoner’s state, it is just devastating that poor and traumatized women are being locked up rather than supported.
Xiqi - The View (10:11):
The guidelines were published in 2018. Do you think misogynistic attitudes in press are being reduced as a result of the campaign?
Janey Starling - We Level up (10:21):
We have seen a real shift actually. Things have really improved. When I was doing a training earlier this year and I brought up some of the headlines from 2018, some of the reporters couldn’t believe it. They thought, what? I can’t believe that was published. Even in space of four years, things have shifted. We’ve still got a lot more work to do. We still see, this is a favourite of newspaper picture editors, they often want to put the picture of the man and the woman at the top next to each other, which is really harmful and inappropriate. That’s one of the biggest things you need to overcome. But I actually have seen a lot more positive reports that’s sensitive to the victim, that talk about her life, that talk about her job, that are quotes from her family and friends rather than just focusing on the man's self-pity.
Xiqi - The View (11:09):
Would you say that the guidelines are well received and have been properly implemented? Can you give us an example? Any feedback from anyone who has read the guidelines or used them?
Janey Starling - We Level up (11:20):
Yes, we’ve done trainings for different outlets across the press, and we have seen a big improvement. The BBC have written some really great articles, and one of the key things that we encourage people to do is not to look at each case as a quote unquote isolated incident, which is what the police always say, but look at it within the systems of violence against women. So recognize that, when you are reporting the case of a woman who’s been murdered in June, for example, look up how many other women have already been killed this year and say, in 2022, X amount of women have been murdered this year. You are already placing the individual case into the bigger picture and actually the BBC did a really great article, which was all of the femicides, and there was a map of all of the women who had been murdered in the UK in one year and it was brilliant. That’s one good example. Also, what we’ve seen is a real, a real gratitude from victims’ families for this as a resource because when they are dealing with grief, dealing with shock, dealing with investigations and police and coroners, they don’t have time to fire fight the media, whereas Level Up will and Level Up does. So, there’s been a role for Level Up and the media guidelines in terms of just taking that off their shoulders and advocating with journalists, because families already have enough on their hands.
Xiqi - The View (12:43):
What is the role of media in reporting domestic abuse cases?
Janey Starling - We Level up (12:47):
So domestic abuse is a public health issue in the UK. Every week, two women are murdered by a partner or ex-partner. Ultimately, we need to prevent women being killed, we need to end domestic abuse. The only way we can do that is if we start using the correct language for it, is if we start identifying what abuse looks like and where survivors and perpetrators can look at themselves in the situation that they’re in and get help. I think the media has two key roles. One is public information and public health in terms of spreading information and accuracy to people about exactly what domestic abuse looks like, exactly what the risk factors are and where you can seek help. One of the things that we put in the guidelines is say whenever you cover domestic abuse, please put the national domestic abuse help line at the bottom because you don’t know who is reading your article and if they recognize any of the aspects of that woman’s story in their own life, they need to seek help.
So that’s one role. And I think the second is to really bring truth and justice to families. People who have lost their mothers and their sisters or any other family member at the hands of a violent partner. They want the truth out there. They want, it’s not that they don’t want the media to cover their stories, it’s the opposite. We did some research and found that two and three families wanted to speak to the media. They wanted the media to cover their loved one’s case, but they wanted it done with accuracy and dignity. And that’s the really key thing. I think journalists can do that incredibly well and often that is the reporting that happens once the case has closed a couple of years down the line, when there’s a longer feature, that’s when the best reporting happens. So, I think the media, in terms of the public, it’s about awareness raising and public health, and in terms of the family, it’s about justice and truth.
Xiqi - The View (14:36):
What does success look like for Level Up campaign?
Janey Starling - We Level up (14:42):
Obviously, I’d love to end domestic abuse, but I think, for the media, for every single publication to be adopting these guidelines and just to follow them like we’re seeing more and more uptake. But I would love it to be across the board every single time a woman is murdered, that these points are taken into consideration and there is accuracy. The images are dignified. She’s spoken about with dignity and respect and that there’s accountability for the perpetrator. That is what I would love to see across all of the press in print, online, and broadcast.
Xiqi - The View
Thank you, Janey. Thank you so much.
Janey Starling - We Level up
Thank you for Thank you much.
Speaker 3 (15:22):
Yeah. And this concludes our podcast for today. Listen out for future podcasts with leading journalists and activists. Thank you for listening.