Four nutter groups: End Violence Against Women, Equality Now, Object and Eaves -- are calling on the Leveson inquiry to move away from addressing the concerns of celebrities and other victims of alleged phone hacking by News International and look at the
daily treatment of women, which they claim contributes to a society where rape can only be committed by evil strangers down darkened alleyways and where a woman is valued only because of her body.
In four detailed submissions the groups lay out
what they see as the worst culprits. The organisations say they took a small sample of sexist, and often misleading, articles from a vast number of supposedly offensive reports.
End Violence Against Women (Evaw) pulled out 10 examples which
they say provides a snapshot of poor reporting of violence against women stories which were either intrusive, inaccurate, which misrepresented or were misogynistic, victim-blaming or condoning violence against women and girls . The
portrayal of prostitutes in the media was also damaging, according to the Evaw submission. It feeds into myths about prostitution, which at worse lead to attitudes that tolerate violence against women in prostitution or regard it as inevitable, it
said.
A joint submission from anti-sexualisation campaign group Object and Turn Your Back on Page 3 charted a week in the life of the Sun, the Daily Star and the Sport . It highlighted an article on 14 November when the Sun trialled invisible shaping bum boosters
by testing men's reactions when a woman bent over at work, and, according to the groups, eroticises a form of sexual harassment making it appear that it is what women should, and do, seek from men .
It criticised the same newspaper for
presenting itself as a family product, offering a free toy on its front page while containing adverts for XXX DVDs and Page 3 imagery , and highlighted a article the day earlier which provided tips for women on how to stop your man having
affairs which included the advice: Men have three basic instincts -- food, shelter and sex. If you nail that as a woman, there's no need for him to look elsewhere.
The organisation's campaigns manager Anna van Heeswijk said: Sexualised images such as 'Page 3' are banned from the workplace due to the intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment that these images can create. Yet, in a situation unusual to the UK, these images saturate national tabloids which are sold without age-restriction in newsagents and supermarkets and which are read and left lying around in the public domain.