'A Fresh Crop of Human Misery': Representations of Bosnian 'War Babies' in the Global Print Media,1991—2006

Abstract

During the war in the former Yugoslavia, women of all ethnic backgrounds were raped and many gave birth to children as a result of this violence. Although numerous journalists wrote about the pregnancies and the babies during the war, almost no attention has been paid to these children as such by human rights organisations during or since. Given the purported agenda-setting role of the global media in drawing attention to new human rights problems, this case represents an interesting puzzle and a site for exploring the interrelationship between gendered, nationalist and rights-based frames in the global media's representations of atrocity. This article explores how these representations both figured in gendered constructions of genocide and negatively affected the prospects of human rights attention to the children in their own right.