GENDER: VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN
Decoding
the language
of violence
against
W MEN
Media reporting of violence against
women is found to contain patterns
of language that perpetuate the harm
and power dichotomy that continue to
exist between men and women.
The #MeToo movement has been a
watershed in global awareness of the scale
of sexual exploitation of women, and how
this often stems from an abuse of power
by men. It has forced onto society both public inquiry
and private introspection, along with some incisive
research into many of the questions being raised.
One of these questions is: What is it about
violence against women that makes it so immune to
social change? And what is it that makes it so silently
accepted at all levels of society? Research by Dr Alessia
Tranchese points to society’s patriarchal structure
in which violence against women is inherent, to the
extent discriminatory practices that sanction violence
are invisible. Through her research, Dr Tranchese aims
to show how everyday practices contribute to the
naturalisation, legitimisation, perpetuation and constant
reinforcement of violence against women. In particular,
she focuses on language in which sexism is endemic,
but is ignored or accepted as natural and harmless.
She asks: Can language tell us something about
the ways in which we understand men, women, and
men’s violence against women? And how can we
understand violence against women as ingrained into
everyday language? These are some of the questions
that Dr Tranchese addresses in her research into media
reporting of violence against women, and the language of
misogyny. She says: “I look at violence against women from
a linguistic point of view, focusing on the media, and this
also extends to online misogyny, silencing and cyber sexism”.
Dr Tranchese, who is a Senior Lecturer in
Communication and Applied Linguistics, has found distinct
patterns of language and grammar that are noticeable
in the way media reporting deals with violence against
women. She has detected, for example, how patterns of
silencing and disbelief towards women are common in
journalism. Rape is associated with violent sex or described
with euphemistic expressions such as ‘forced intercourse’,
‘sex at knifepoint’, or ‘sex with a drugged woman’.
The reporting dynamics that routinely take sexual
assault and rape to these extremes in the news can,
perversely, have a disempowering effect on women and
instil a fear of being disbelieved. This silences women
further. The rise of #MeToo has been seen as a sign
of change in these dynamics, as women seem to have
been given a voice loud and clear enough to remove
the veil of mistrust that hangs over most cases of abuse
against them.
Whether #MeToo has led to a real change in the
way we understand and speak about violence against
women is being explored by Dr Tranchese in a book on
the representation of sexual violence in the media. Titled
From Fritzl to #MeToo: Ten Years of Coverage of Rape in
the British Press, the book is due for release in 2021. It
covers high-profile cases, such as Jimmy Savile's alleged
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ISSUE 1 / 2020