Dignity for Dead Women

Radio Helsinki

„Feminist Activism and the Media“ was a cooperation between F*Streik Graz and Radio Helsinki. The presentation from Janey Starling explored her feminist interventions in the media as well as her strategic use of it in her campaigning work.

Janey Starling is an award-winning feminist activist, writer and co-director of gender justice organisation Level Up.

She spearheaded the UK’s first media guidelines on responsibly reporting domestic homicide, Dignity for Dead Women, which are now backed by all British press regulators and multiple newsrooms. The guidelines and newsroom trainings, which were co-created with victims‘ families, are changing the way that domestic homicide is reported by the UK media.

Janey has since delivered guest lectures on the subject at London School of Economics and the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford. She has also appeared on Ted Talks.

Her other media interventions include pushing an investigation into Facebook’s failure to deal with sexism and harassment on its platform and successfully pressuring a UK TV station into dropping plastic surgery advertisements from popular dating show Love Island.

Janey’s current campaign focus is on ending the imprisonment of pregnant women. In the last four years, she has successfully used a media-based campaign strategy to secure mainstream coverage of the experiences of pregnant women in prison, and revealed exclusive new data about prisons, in order to shift public attitudes and sentencing practices in the court system.