There’s a Facebook message thread I share with a few close female friends. We’re all twentysomething Albanians, most of us from Kosovo. We use the thread to complain and commiserate about work and life, and share articles and issues we’re passionate about. There probably isn’t a week that goes by that one of us doesn’t share borderline or outright sexist articles about women from a Kosovan news source. This includes silly advice articles about women’s bodies and what they should do with them, stories that refer to “forced sexual intercourse” instead of rape, and sage advice from old men admonishing Kosovo’s young women to reproduce. It’s a reminder of Kosovo’s deeply ingrained sexism, staring at you in print or online, day in and day out. If you happen to wake up one morning as a woman in Kosovo feeling good about yourself, a quick browse through online news sources or a skim through a daily paper will quickly rid you of that feeling.
To be fair, Kosovo’s media isn’t completely in the dark ages when it comes to gender. A few of Kosovo’s national media outlets are run by women, and issues such as wartime rape and domestic violence get covered regularly. For a country of 1.7 million people, Kosovo has a lot of media outlets: eight national newspapers with their accompanying websites, 21 TV stations, 83 radio stations and by now countless online news portals. Nearly all of them have troubling blindspots in how they cover women. A Konrad Adenauer Stiftung report on the portrayal of women in Kosovo’s newsprint media states that women are frequently portrayed as sex objects, mothers, wives, girlfriends, and victims, and significantly less often as professionals, experts, or sources of information within reported stories. This misrepresentation casually reinforces the subordinate position of women in Kosovo, the majority of whom are unemployed, less educated, overlooked in family inheritance, and more likely to experience gender-based violence than men.
'Woman's Thoughts'. Photo: PhotonQ via Flickr. Some rights reserved.
