After Ryan Hart’s father killed his mother and sister some of the press displayed a bias towards the murderer

When Ryan Hart’s father killed his mother, Claire, and sister, Charlotte, three years ago, the family’s anguish was compounded by a slew of insensitive media coverage.

Articles quoted neighbours saying Ryan’s father was “the nicest guy you could ever meet” and that his parents were the “loveliest couple”. In one instance, the domestic homicide was described as being “understandable”.

“There was a rush to excuse our father’s actions in the media and to sympathise with him that showed a complete misunderstanding of coercively controlling men,” Ryan says.

“They don’t abuse their neighbours, they target their abuse at the family and put a facade on to the outside world. We shouldn’t be surprised when murdering men appear to be normal men because that’s how they’ve kept their control of their family hidden for so long.”

Now, after a year of campaigning, Hart is forcing a change to guidelines on media coverage that will encourage a greater accuracy in reporting domestic homicides. These guidelines will aim for journalists to place accountability solely on the killer, crack down on sensationalist language, and avoiding using trivialising imagery, with a greater sensitivity towards culture and religion.

The hope is to end the posthumous exculpation of family killers, which Hart believes might actually have encouraged his father to kill.

“Our father was Googling for many months about men who murdered their wives and children before he killed his own wife and daughter,” Ryan says. “He was looking to see what sort of response he would get, since men who murdered their wives are often quoted as ‘nice guys’ because they’ve put so much work into maintaining this false reputation. And that’s exactly what happened with him.”

The guidelines will be published later this month by the journalism regulatory body , the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso). While they are an advisory resource for now, Hart hopes to make them part of Ipso’s editors’ code of practice, which member organisations must follow or face fines of up to £1m for breaching. Member organisations include the Sun, the Times, the Daily Mail, and the Sunday Telegraph.

Created by feminist organisation Level Up, in consultation with survivors such as Ryan Hart and criminologist Dr Jane Monckton-Smith, these “dignity for dead women” guidelines not only aim to increase sensitivity around reporting on domestic violence cases but also act as a checklist for reporters writing about cases.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest David Challen, the son of Sally Challen who the family say was coercively controlled by her husband whom she admits to killing. Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA

Points to note include only using police-authorised images of the victim and including those of the perpetrator at the bottom, describing the perpetrator’s actions in an active voice, and refraining from using neighbours’ quotes in the absence of family members.

The misrepresentation of abusive men is a phenomenon Carys Afoko, the executive director of Level Up, believes occurs throughout the media. “There’s a sense that some victims are more sympathetic than others,” Afoko says, “if you’re a nurse you might get sympathetic coverage, but if you left your partner for a woman, you’ll probably get ‘lesbian sex shame murder’. Some women are considered appropriate victims and others aren’t, while for the men there isn’t a culture of accountability.”

“Our guidelines are focused on making sure that the reporting on women is responsible, and giving them the dignity that they’ve been denied in their deaths,” Afoko says. “Too often these things are reported as crimes of passion, like in the Sally Challen case, when actually they’re crimes of control. We need to dismantle these myths around domestic abuse.”

Ipso’s head of standards, Charlotte Unwin, says that while it receives relatively few complaints about domestic violence reporting as an organisation, “this is a topic with significant social impact”.

For Teresa Parker at the charity Women’s Aid, this social impact must also include the voices of those who have survived domestic abuse. “So much of the reporting on domestic homicide cases is court reporting, which means that often the prosecution’s words are presented as fact,” she says, “this leaves the victim with no voice, and so it’s important for her story to be included. This new guidance will help achieve that.”

As well as providing a voice, ultimately Ryan Hart believes that better media representation could reframe the narrative of domestic abuse for potential perpetrators. “The men who commit these crimes don’t feel that they’re doing anything wrong,” he says, “so if we keep pushing these narratives through the media, the men will remain in an echo chamber.”

Ryan and Level Up also have plans to begin newsroom training. “The Samaritans campaign to better report on suicide has been so successful and was implemented into the editors’ code, so we hope we can do the same with domestic homicide,” Ryan says, “we can’t let it become normalised, otherwise the media becomes complicit in murder.”