1 Violence against women in Indian newspapers Amanda Gilbertson and Niharika Pandit Abstract: The media shapes public understanding of violence against women and girls, but until now there has been no systematic review of reporting on violence against women and girls in Indian media. This paper presents results of analysis of over 1500 articles from four mainstream Indian newspapers, two English and two Hindi, and measures these articles against several sets of guidelines for reporting on violence against women and girls. This analysis revealed that mainstream newspapers’ reporting on violence against women and girls is overwhelmingly incident-based, presenting this violence as a series of isolated events rather than a systemic social issue. Thematic reporting that explicitly challenges common myths about violence against women and girls, describes the difficulties survivors face in seeking justice and provides information about support and resources for survivors is very rare. Other problems included excessive detail, sensationalist language (particularly in Hindi newspapers), an under-reporting of domestic violence, and a failure to name domestic violence as such. These results suggest that guidelines for reporting on gendered violence should be included in the Press Council of India’s ‘Norms of Journalistic Conduct’ and that media organizations should be asked to endorse and commit to these guidelines. Keywords: violence, gender, media, newspapers 1. Introduction There is good evidence that the media shapes public understanding of violence against women and girls (Carlyle et al. 2014; Palazzolo and Roberto 2011; Anastasio and Costa 2004). Research from several different countries has identified weaknesses of media coverage of violence against women and girls (VAWG), including individualizing incidents of VAWG and failing to provide social context, sensationalism, perpetuating rape myths, and victim blaming (Morgan and Politoff 2012; Sutherland et al. 2015; Marhia 2008; Clark 1992; Mason and Monckton-Smith 2008; Bullock and Cubert 2002; Consalvo 1998). This has led to several sets of guidelines for journalists on how to report on violence against women (see Sutherland et al. (2015: 28-30) for a summary). Although VAWG has been a high-profile issue in India for many years, and India’s media coverage of VAWG has been critiqued by a number of commentators (e.g., Feminism in India 2016), very little scholarly research has been conducted on this media coverage. Indeed, there has been more scholarly attention to the Orientalizing narratives of international media reporting on the Delhi gang rape of December 2012 (Durham 2015; Patil and Purkayastha 2015; Roychowdhury 2013) than there has been to reporting on this incident in Indian media (Nagar 2016; Rao 2014). This paper presents results from the first systematic review of newspaper