WOMEN’s Centre for Change (WCC) and KDU College jointly organised a workshop titled “Child Rights and Ethical Journalism” on Oct 21.
KDU College was the host for the workshop which saw some 100 journalism students from KDU Penang, Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) and TAR College attending.
The workshop began with a welcoming address from Evelyn Lim, Academic Department Head of KDU Mass Communication Department.
Following that, Dr. Prema Devaraj, programme consultant for WCC, conducted the first session titled “Sexual Crimes and Vulnerable Victims”.
She started by introducing sexual crimes and the vulnerability of victims, especially children, who have been sexually abused.
She then went on to explore some common misconceptions of sexual crimes.
In the following session, Dr. Shakila Manan, associate professor from USM, conducted a case study on the news reporting surrounding the rape-murder of Noritta Samsudin in 2003.
This case study explored how the gradual build-up of negative reporting surrounding Noritta caused the perception of her to shift from being the victim of a monstrous crime to her seemingly having contributed to her own death due to her perceived immorality.
The third session by Joshua Teh, advocacy officer for WCC, revealed the results of a ground-breaking four-month media survey conducted by WCC in 2014 on reporting of sexual crimes involving children.
He explored how placing a combination of identification markers such as the victim’s age, address, and parents’ occupation, among others, in a news report could lead to the identification of the victim.
The final session was a panel discussion on “Ethical Journalism and Moving Forward”.
Moderated by Joshua Teh, Prema was joined by Dr. Mustafa Kamal from the Penang Institute and Himanshu Bhatt, a senior journalist, on several key issues raised throughout the course of the workshop.} else {