Resources - Research Reports

Research Reports are indepth, often quantitative reports around our various programme areas.

Category: Children [REMOVE]

A Tangled Web: Human Trafficking, Child Protection & the Media

As a metaphor, a web does nicely to describe human trafficking: a thing with many threads, sticky, dangerous, and unseen by victims. The sticky threads each different yet inseparable, certainly not linear, clean, neat and easily spotted…well unless you’re the spider that is.

What do we know about human trafficking? What should we know about it? What are we being told by the media? What is the media missing?

The Best Promoter & Worst Violator of Children’s Rights in SA Print Media (January - March 2011)

MMA has produced a MAD OAT quarterly report for the first three months of 2011. This report is a qualitative assessment of articles published by mainstream print mediums which, in our view, clearly violated or promoted children’s rights.

Children’s Views not in the News; Portrayal of Children in South African Print Media 2010

MMA has been monitoring and analysing print media’s performance, in terms of how it reports on children, since 2003. This is its fourth report on the topic, and since 2003 the percentage of articles featuring children has doubled.

Author and MMA’s Specialised Children’s Monitoring Project Coordinator Ronell Singh says that “while we are seeing gradual progress being made in how the media reports on children, there is still plenty of room for improvement – look at how few features or in-depth analysis articles deal with children for example – just 4%. It is these longer and more in depth articles that can better explore children’s issues and put them on the agenda, and yet, even since last year, we are seeing children appearing in fewer of these articles instead of more.”

Children’s Views not in the News; Portrayal of Children in South African Print Media 2009 -2010

For this report MMA monitored 13 of South Africa’s major news publications for content on children over a period of nine months (from September 2009 to May 2010. Since 2003 the coverage afforded to children, children’s rights and their issues by the South African media has been steadily growing. According to this report it stands at 11.4%. But there is still significant room for improvement, both in terms of the quantity and quality of reporting on children.

Children’s Views Not in the News: Portrayal of Children in South African Print Media 2009

Monitoring conducted by Media Monitoring Africa (MMA) in 2003 as part of the Empowering Children & the Media (ECM) strategy showed that only 6% of all news included children. The latest data to emerge from the ECM reveals that representation of children has improved, marginally, to 8.4% of all news monitored in 2009. The monitoring shows that not only are children’s issues frequently sidelined, but un-careful and unethical reporting often leads to further violations of their rights.

Deadly silence - Media election coverage confirms disinterest in the welfare of children

With the exception of a handful of articles by some journalists, election coverage highlighting the serious issues faced by South African children has been extremely disappointing for its absence. In the previous weekly report, it was noted that in media’s role of holding government to account and informing citizens, it was particularly important for media to give voice to the concerns and opinions of the marginalised in society, as so often they remain silenced through powerlessness and political disinterest. It is even more important that media fulfil this role during an election period, when the need for information and potential for influence and change is the greatest.

Media and the 16 Days Campaign 2006

The coverage of The 16 Days Campaign in Gauteng media coverage, including e-tv and SABC 3 prime time news, was reasonable good in most aspects. Some improvements could be made in terms of reporting on woman and child abuse.

Media wise - children make the difference

The comprehensive research study proposed by the MMP, the first of its kind in South Africa, aimed to address the representation of children and children’s rights in the news media. The ECM project took place over a three-month period in 2003. A group of monitors reviewed print, radio and television media to identify trends in the portrayal of children in the news. In an exciting and innovative research approach, the MMP also sought the active participation of children, in order to understand their views and perceptions of children’s representation in the media. The MMP, together with Clacherty & Associates, an organisation that specialises in participatory work with children, co-developed the content and methodology of the participatory workshops. Clacherty & Associates facilitated the workshops, which were run with the children. As part of the process, the children engaged in a parallel monitoring project where they monitored the media for a two-week period. This was done so that the children could express their views directly and see for themselves how they are represented by the

The Children’s Media Mentoring Project (CMMP) Report

The Media Monitoring Project pioneered a best practice approach to working with children as monitors and with journalists as mentors in a project called the Children’s Media Mentoring Project. MMP worked together with the Institute for the Advancement of Journalism (IAJ) and Agência de Notícas dos Direitos da Infância (ANDI: a Brazilian news agency focused on children’s rights). This report describes the project activities and looks at The Star newspaper as a case study on the effectiveness of the MMP’s approach.

Getting the best out of the media: Analysis of media coverage of the 16 Days of No Violence Against

The Media Monitoring Project (MMP) found an increase in the amount of coverage provided to the16 Days of Activism Campaign No Violence Against
Women and Children during 2005. The majority of South African media performed particularly well, in some crucial respects the media performed
better in comparison to the 16 Days of Activism Campaign in 2004.

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