Six weeks ago News Corp’s The Daily Telegraph unveiled a new campaign — involving the NSW premier and police commissioner — that declared it would be referring to any alleged act of domestic violence as a “coward attack”, where the law permitted.
“The assailants are really, by definition, the smallest of men. Our language should reflect that,” wrote editor Ben English and weekend editor Anna Caldwell in a July 12 editorial.
An associated exclusive published that day quoted Police Commissioner Karen Webb referring to perpetrators as “cowards” who “have a choice” and were “choosing violence”. The piece also quoted NSW Premier Chris Minns calling the Sydney tabloid “100% right” to call out “all those cowards that have committed domestic violence particularly against women and children”.
“I think that that language is long overdue,” he said.
On July 12, English also promoted the piece on LinkedIn alongside a video featuring several Daily Telegraph local and court reporters retelling their experiences covering domestic violence in the NSW courts.
Despite the high-profile campaign launch, however, the publication has been less committed to following through. A search undertaken by Crikey on September 9 found that since July 12, 28 articles could be found for the keywords “domestic violence” under The Daily Telegraph brand, compared to just five for “coward attack”.
Of those 28 articles, 16 referred to specific offenders; only one mentioned The Daily Telegraph’s campaign to rebrand offenders as “cowards” in the copy, while another used the word “coward” in the headline.
Of the 12 articles that didn’t refer to specific offenders, one referred directly to stalkers as “cowards”, and another to “cowardly” acts of domestic violence. One headline referred to “cowards”, while another mentioned cowards in the headline and detailed The Telegraph’s campaign.
Only one article found in the search, written by Telegraph weekend chief of staff Jake McCallum, was consistent in its reference to The Telegraph’s campaign and the terms “coward attack” and “coward assault”.
Dr Hayley Boxall, a domestic and family violence researcher at the Australian National University, said she had noticed The Daily Telegraph had been “a bit inconsistent in their terminology”.
Boxall said there was “no evidence to suggest that changing the language in this way is going to make people safer”, despite the campaign having the support of the NSW police commissioner and premier.
“I think it’s a very ideological kind of decision — and it’s completely understandable because people are angry and they’re frustrated. This year has been such a horrible year for violence against women, and I think that this is a very literal attempt to hold people accountable.”
Boxall said the extent of the effect of The Daily Telegraph’s new campaign was aesthetics.
“It might make us feel better in the community, it might make us feel like we’re holding people accountable, but there’s no real expert evidence to suggest it’ll make a difference.”
When asked whether rebrands of violent crime had been tried before, Boxall said it was the latest in a long line of variously successful attempts.
“We used to talk about wife-battering for example, but then we started talking about domestic violence, and then we’ve kind of changed that to intimate partner violence. More recently we’ve talked about branding it as domestic abuse to recognise that ‘violence’ makes us often think of physical violence,” she said.
“This is probably one of the first attempts that I’ve seen of trying to use deliberately shaming language to try and make (domestic violence) perpetrators accountable — we’ve seen it in other areas of criminal behaviour. You can see it with the ‘king hit’. We deliberately changed the language around that to a ‘coward’s punch’ to try and make it more shameful to use these types of behaviours, but there’s no evidence to suggest that it actually works.”
Indeed, before the beginning of the campaign, the majority of The Daily Telegraph’s use of “coward attack” or similar phrasing was in reference to alcohol-fuelled violence, often at licensed venues, previously described as ‘king hits’.
Boxall said the approach by The Daily Telegraph was ultimately a “very simplistic way of looking at how we can address crime, and we’ve seen that with domestic and family violence and [other] really serious forms of violence, that just doesn’t really work.”
Crikey asked editor Ben English several questions, including why the paper had appeared to dwindle in its use of the phrase “coward attack”, what the legal barriers might be as to the use of the term, and whether the paper stood by the premise of the campaign in light of some of the criticisms reflected by Boxall after its launch. He did not respond in time for publication.
If you or someone you know is affected by sexual assault or violence, call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732 or visit 1800RESPECT.org.au. In an emergency, call 000.
