Women in situations of distress receive a disproportionate amount of news coverage. As survivors (or perpetrators) of crime, violence, or natural disasters, they are naturally “newsworthy”—a newsroom term for the subjective lens with which truthtellers define and select their news frames. These frames, which govern the identification and coverage of what is “newsworthy,” box women into specific, patriarchal roles. Women who do not fall within the traditional feminine archetypes are labeled as dissidents or insurgents, and are excluded, dismissed, rejected, or worse persecuted, until the news recasts them into more familiar molds. This is exemplified in the Philippine Daily Inquirer’s news coverage of Mary Jane Veloso, a Filipina convicted of drug trafficking in Indonesia and sentenced to death in 2010. An examination of the Inquirer’s coverage of the Veloso case unearthed the gender biases that are inherent in the subjective rules that govern the patterns of selection and depiction in mainstream newsrooms.

Barangay Violence Against Women (VAW) Desk officers are the frontliners in the provision of services to a victim/survivor of domestic violence. They are the first persons that a woman encounters, and they determine whether her truth claim identifies her as domestic violence case, thereby enabling her to access State-provided services and interventions. Thus, it is important to inquire into the Desk officers’ worldviews and beliefs, also called schemas, and how these influence the ways they communicate and interact with the victim/survivors they encounter daily in their work. Guided by gender schema theory, this study examines the drawings of the VAW Desk officers—and the ecology of images that accompany these drawings—to delve into their cognitive constructions of the gendered nature of domestic violence. Two dominant schemas emerge from this examination: the schema of heteronormativity (dapat), and the schema of the necessary visibility of domestic violence (kita). These schemas govern the Desk officers’ everyday judgments and decision making, and inform the ways they communicate with domestic violence victim/survivors.