Curator: Too Grim to Print

I’m excited to be leading a panel at the Coercive Control Conference (CCC). It will be held at the John Jay Criminal Law College in New York in April. My session is titled “Too Grim to Print: How Journalism Silences Coercive Control and How We Broke Through.”

The idea comes from more than a decade of researching, pitching and reporting on stories and getting familiar responses. Great story, but too grim. It’s too complex and a bit niche.

Getting stories such as Runaway Mothers, The Silence of Domestic Spiking, Dissociative Identity Disorder, He Chose Porn Over Me and Narcissistic Mothers to air has meant navigating editorial guidelines, legal scrutiny and duty of care.

For every story that makes it, there are ideas, pitches,  completed edits sitting in the “nearly got there” pile.

This panel is about the invisible labour, the work behind the work.

I’ll be joined by an exceptional group of people:

• Professor Amy Burrell, an academic specialising in sexual violence and offender behaviour

• Teresa Parker, a comms strategist working with survivors, charities and journalists on domestic abuse reporting

• Natalie Queiroz MBE, survivor of attempted domestic homicide and a leading advocate for survivor voices.

It’s a chance for us to talk honestly about how journalists, survivors, campaigners, press teams, academics and charities can work together more effectively and why repetition without a neat news hook is often what’s required to normalise stories.

A sincere thank you to Teri Yuan at The Engendered Collective for picking my selecting my proposal and organising the conference.

Full conference details here.