Feminist Media Studies 3(3) November 2003 : 283-299

This article focuses on the discursive representations of domestic violence portrayed in three television documentaries produced as part of a New Zealand Police national media campaign developed from 1994. The campaign message was "family violence is a crime" and aimed to raise public awareness of family violence as a criminal offence. It also included television advertisements and other media and was planned to run until 1999, but was terminated in 1997 due to lack of funding. The documentaries, entitled "Not Just a Domestic" (1994), "Not Just a Domestic: The Update" (1994), and "Picking Up the Pieces" (1996), focus on family violence and Police initiatives to combat it. The authors argue that the campaign was, and remains, influential in framing understandings of domestic violence in New Zealand and elsewhere. For this reason they argue that it is important to consider how the campaign materials represent and encourage audiences to make sense of male violence against women. In conclusion, the authors argue that the documentaries privilege discourses that effectively silence the roles of both abusers and society in perpetrating male violence, while focusing on the victim's experience in ways that risk affirming victim-blaming discourses. The authors further argue that these "discursive manoeuvres" reflect the producers' need to maintain the interest of, rather than alienate, male viewers in order to both maximise audience ratings and communicate with potential perpetrators of, and witnesses to, domestic violence.