Abstract
Digital news during the COVID-19 pandemic has obscured the role of the gender power structure in perpetuating global violence against women, despite the numerous fatal and nonfatal health consequences linked to this phenomenon. Limited media framing, which attributes the violence to pandemic-related conditions and presents it as occurring primarily between intimate partners in the domestic sphere, minimizes the differential realities and experiences of women across social locations and public and private settings, both within and outside of disease outbreaks. This qualitative, interpretive content analysis highlights the power of hegemonic discourses of gendered violence to render invisible inequalities among intersectional groups both within and between countries and to largely disconnect the structural conditions undergirding it. The findings of this chapter reinforce the need for journalists to provide more comprehensive reporting on the structural sources of violence against women and to draw public attention to the urgent need for gender-specific programming to improve global health outcomes.
