Working paper title: Does news coverage of violence against women affect its judicial treatment? Evidence from France

By: Maëlle Stricot, Paris School of Economics

Abstract

This paper explores how news coverage of violence against women (VAW) affects the reporting and judicial treatment of sexual and domestic violence. I combine high-frequency data on French TV news content with rich novel administrative data on almost all cases handled by the criminal justice system in France. I document a relatively low level of prosecution of perpetrators of VAW, as well as limited coverage of such violence on TV news, but significant changes have occurred over the last decade. Exploiting the quasi-random timing of news in the short run, I next estimate the effect of TV news coverage of VAW on each stage of the legal process - namely reporting, prosecution and sentencing decisions. First, news on VAW crimes have a relatively small impact on the propensity to report sexual or domestic violence. Second, prosecutors are less likely to dismiss a case after news coverage of VAW crimes. The effect amounts to a 2% increase in prosecutions of perpetrators of VAW in the week following the news coverage, mainly for domestic violence and cases that were on the verge of being dismissed. Third, sentencing decisions made by judges are not affected by news coverage of VAW. These findings imply that documenting and talking about VAW is important to raise prosecution and effectively combat this violence.

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