The South African Human Rights Commission and human rights violations in education : an analysis of media reports

Abstract

This article examines how South African newspapers report on the activities of the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) regarding human rights violations in South African schools over a five-year period (1 January 2005 to 31 December 2009). The overarching research question that guided this study is: Can the media play a role in cultivating and creating a particular view of human rights violations in schools and advocate policy change through their framing of the activities of the SAHRC? McManus and Dorfman's guidelines were used to analyse the structural and content frames of 161 articles that were retrieved from the SAMedia database. These news stories provide a glimpse on the wide variety of human rights violations the SAHRC investigated during the five-year period. The interrogation of the two dominant content frames, namely school violence and infringements on learners' rights to basic education, reveals newspapers' superficial and sensationalised coverage of human rights violations. The analysis exposes the media's lack of policy advocacy.