Beijing Declaration: The role of media in women’s empowerment

The drafters of the declaration were optimistic that the media could play a crucial role in changing the status of women in society. For example, the 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action identified the weak position of women in decision-making processes in news media organizations as a major challenge for the media to play its empowering role.

This meant that the majority of media outlets were owned and run by men. With so many more women now sitting at the decision-making tables of media organisations, it is interesting to see how far the world has come in tipping this balance. There is still work to be done, but some good progress has been made.

Other areas include the persistence of stereotypical portrayals of women in the media and the increase in violent and pornographic images of women, the lack of gender sensitivity in media policies and programmes, women’s poor access to media and ICT, women’s poor participation in media and ICT, and increased consumerism promotion. and the related effort to objectify women. Some of the key points made in the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action was the idea that the media had the potential to make a much greater contribution to the advancement of women by greatly influencing public policy and private attitudes and behavior towards women.

She therefore called for the elimination of negative and derogatory images of women in media communications to provide a balanced picture of women’s diverse lives and contributions to society in an ever-changing world. If we were to count how our world has changed in the last 30 years, we would be lost along the way.

Consider the way the media itself is changing. Last week I attended a meeting of groups ranging from journalists to human rights lawyers, and I was surprised by some of the participants insisting that the right to freedom of expression is everyone’s right. He is a journalist ‘by default’. The fact that people use social media has turned every individual with a social media account into a journalist.

The truth is that our world and our perception of what these things not so long ago meant are changing rapidly. This means there are new concerns about women’s empowerment and gender equality. As definitional issues exacerbate and cloud our judgment of the practice of journalism, its affordances, and its limitations, we can no longer take for granted that the media will play some of the roles we know they will.

Therefore, some questions remain. What can the media meaningfully do to end violence against women and girls? How can more women be empowered and become a force for good in our society? What structural injustices remain that require concerted efforts to improve the starting point for most women? Is there a need to reconsider the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action? Conceptualized around the 30th anniversary of the 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, this year’s 16 days of activism acknowledge ‘despite the efforts of women’s rights movements to demand justice and accountability and some notable progress in preventing and responding to violence against women’. Girls, significant challenges remain in fully addressing the problem’.

Many in this struggle will also tell you that progress is sometimes too slow. This is a call for us as media to be deliberate in covering not only the 16 days of activism to end violence against women and girls, but also to look back at the last 30 years and evaluate what the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action have brought. as well as missing links.