Women beware women

Joanna Bourke takes a look at coverage of women’s violence and asks why it’s not reported in the same ways as men’s violence.

Women Beware Women

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Charlie Brooker on men

It’s typical Charlie Brooker style – opinionated, rude, a bit surreal – but lots of fun for taking  a look at gender from a different perspective.

Charlie Brooker in The Guardian

Encouraging understanding of difference

Here’s a piece from today’s BBC website about attempts to offer positive representations and increased understanding of mental health problems to teenagers.

We used The Curious Incident… as an example of a text that makes an intervention into how disability and mental health (or just perceived “weirdness”) might be represented, and this article could be a helpful complementary text.

Positive representations of young people

Article in this week’s Guardian about the “happiness league” for young people. This could be a useful counterpoint to the scaremongering of other, less flattering representations elsewhere on the blog.

More friends and emotional security…

Social workers and children’s services

Following the horrific Baby P story, the papers have been full of vitriolic attacks on social workers in Haringey (and in general). Here’s a taste of some of the ways in which this social group and individuals such as Sharon Shoesmith have been represented comments on The Sun’s message boards.

Sun letters and texts

Daily Mirror – view from a social worker

Daily Mail – “bungling social workers put children at risk”

Daily Mail – social workers criticised for “flimsy abuse claim”

You can’t win with the Daily Mail, can you?

As an ENGA1 mode exercise, you might find the comparisons between Sun letters and text messages useful too.

Single mothers

I’ve encouraged my students to google a phrase to get texts on a more specific topic.  Demonstrating it with “single mother”, some of the first-page hits I got were: this Guardian piece on J K Rowling and her rags-to-riches story (from July 1997); this Independent comment by Kate Saunders on her own experience (from Apr 2007) and this wonderful example from the Daily Mail about a single Nigerian mother who lives in a big house that – guess what – we the taxpayers are funding (from Nov 2008).  There’s clearly enough here for an investigation, but any of the texts could also be used as part of an ‘institution’ investigation into the idea of Family, or further texts about J K Rowling or Omowunmi Odia could be found for a piece on individuals.

Representation of young people

Some good stuff on the BBC website today linked to the new Barnardo’s campaign “Children in Trouble”.

BBC story

Barnardo’s campaign

Could be a good investigation focus with a ready-made creative task in writing a charity ad to present a more positive representation?

Social groups – “pikeys”

BBC Magazine article on the word “pikey”

Wikipedia’s definitions of “pikey”