Discourse on Media Masculine Crisis and Gender-based Violence against Women in Nigeria

Abstract

This study is a position paper on media and masculine crisis on gender-based violence against women in Nigeria. It has become obvious that masculinity crisis is biologically fixed and a child of culture. Utilizing media effect in moderating gender based violence in Nigeria as a result of masculine crisis seems to be yielding result because epistemological and methodological studies have failed to consider the media as a veritable tool to curbing masculinity crisis; rather, these researches have focused more on statistics and academic based findings. Utilizing analysis within diverse theoretical frameworks, this study has demonstrated that the media faced specific problems in influencing masculine crisis relating to gender violence in society. Consequent upon this, media attention is focused on immediate events rather than events that have growing effects on the society. This study suggests new directions in the sociology of news (longitudinal, historic, contextual and interpretative) which are needed in media-masculine crisis-gender violence based research. These attributes inform media institutions to effectively communicate the associated effects of gender based violence at micro and macro levels and heighten public perception and unacceptability of masculine crisis and its effect on gender based violence. The study, therefore, recommends that issues arising from domestic violence should not be tolerated but seen as an act that is punishable by law and also that the media should be effectively used in constructing and re-constructing behavioural and attitudinal changes, in the area of risk associated with domestic violence.