Women Against Violence: Issue Twenty one 2009 21 article Melinda McPherson the role of press representations in re-instituting silence and violence s traw women abstract Several shootings that took place in the Central Business District of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia on 18 June, 2007 cast into sharp relief the continuing prevalence of discriminatory reporting on women. Journalistic treatment of assault victims Kara Douglas and Autumn Daly-Holt implied the women’s culpability in their own, and others’, assaults by tapping into stereotypes that suggest ‘women ask for it.’ This paper theorises the operation of a straw woman – an externally constituted effigy – upon whom the press drew, instead of the real women, to grab audience attention. Beginning with a theorisation of the straw woman, I will engage discourse analysis to explore the press’ replacement of Daly-Holt and Douglas. It is argued that the violence done by Hudson to Daly-Holt and Douglas is re-created in the violence of their displacement as articulators of their own subjectivity and experiences. prologue This paper provides commentary on the media treatment of victims in the 2007 Melbourne CBD shootings. In particular, I was interested in the discourses that surround representations of those victims, especially from a gendered, age, and class perspective. A core aspect of my argument is that these discourses, especially about gender, can be observed in the nature of the reporting sources accessed by the media, and on the information it chose to include/exclude or emphasise about the victims. Further to this, I would argue that in lieu of the women speaking publicly, their silences presented as an opportunity to negatively conscript them into a story about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behaviours – implying their culpability in Hudson’s (the perpetrator) actions. I would thus like to make clear that my argument in this paper is not (for the most part) about the ‘truth’ of the information presented in the papers. It is about how the women were negatively represented and characterised by virtue of their implicit comparison with hegemonic patriarchal values (morality, family life, ‘respectable’ employment, etc) attributed to the male victims. With respect to this paper, I would like to make the following clear. First, by pointing out the uses of information by the media, and emphasising the differences between representations of the men compared with the women, I am in no way implying that the men were not brave. For the record, I consider the actions of all those who came to the aid of the attacked or injured on that day, including Keilar, de Waard, and Douglas, to be humanitarian, empathic,