The construction of gender-based violence in British print and broadcast media: a case study

This study is part of an ongoing investigation into the portrayal of violence against women in the British media and it draws on Fairclough’s model of CDA and Kress and van Leeuwen’s theory of multimodality. The aim of this analysis is to compare the representation of victims and perpetrators of rape in the printed and broadcast media. By bringing to light the intertextual and interdiscursive elements which come out of the comparative linguistic and/or semiotic investigation, this study explores how an incident of rape is recontextualised in two different media and across genres through the use of different verbal and visual strategies. In addition, this research aims at showing how media discourse, regardless of the genre, may contribute to creating a stereotyped construction of gender-based violence by, for example, shifting the responsibility from the perpetrator to the victim’s mother, thus minimising the rapist’s foul play and leading to his almost total invisibility.