Northwest Indiana Discussion

Bozell Column: TV's Increasing Female Body Count

By Brent Bozell (Bio | Archive)
October 30, 2009 - 23:16 ET

Violence – especially grotesque, gory or bloody violence – has become a staple of network television during sweeps periods. But there’s a new kind of violence surging -- violence against women. A new study by the Parents Television Council called "Women in Peril" reveals that between 2004 and 2009, CBS, NBC, and Fox (but not ABC) all green-lighted a significant increase in the incidents – and degree – of violence against women.

On average, during the five-year span there was a two percent increase in overall violence during the prime time viewing hours. But during the same time period there was a 120 percent increase in the number of times the audience would be exposed to a violent scene with a female victim.

CBS, the "CSI" network, led with 118 violent storylines on women, but NBC had the largest increase, at 192 percent. The forms of violence depicted included rape, stabbing, dismemberment, electrocution, poisoning, shooting, beating, and torture. Death was regularly a result of the violence.

This stat tells it all: In a complete reversal of tradition, network programmers strongly favored violence depicted on screen (92 percent) rather than implied (5 percent) or merely described (3 percent).

Nothing’s sacred. A smaller, but growing category in network sensationalism is violence against female children, virtually unseen in the past (six incidents in the 2004 February and May sweeps). There were 30 such scenes on the same networks during the same time slots in 2009. CBS’s "CSI" featured a plot about a teenaged girl found dead in a parking lot (with the corpse shown several times), and in flashback scenes, viewers saw her assaulted by a friend’s father. For good measure, there was an attempted sexual assault while she was unconscious. A gorier scene aired on NBC’s "Medium," where a suspect was shown photos of a teenage girl whose throat was slit and covered in blood.

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