Mediated Accountability Beyond the Domestic/Global Divide: A Relational Analysis of Gender-Based Violence Reform in India and South Korea

Abstract

This article examines how media contribute to state accountability after highly visible cases of gender-based violence. Rather than treating domestic and global media, or media and the state, as separate actors that exert pressure across fixed boundaries, it develops a relational non-dualistic framework. Drawing on agential realism, framing theory, and accountability scholarship, the article conceptualises legal reform as an outcome produced through interactions among journalists, activists, digital platforms, publics, courts, and governments. A comparative qualitative analysis of the 2012 Nirbhaya case in India and the 2018–2020 Nth Room case in South Korea identifies four mechanisms: making harm publicly governable, translating claims across scales, inscribing crisis into law, and closing controversy through symbolic reform. The comparison shows that media influence was substantial in accelerating legal responses but conditional on the architecture of civil society networks and institutional receptivity. India's response was organised around mass protest, a highly personalised national symbol, and contested transnational representation; South Korea's response relied more heavily on investigative coalitions, platform evidence, and petition infrastructures. In both cases, legal change restored a measure of legitimacy while leaving implementation gaps and structural gender inequality intact. Media therefore function less as an external watchdog than as part of the socio-legal relations through which accountability becomes visible, demandable, and temporarily institutionalised.