The Framing of Gender and Sexual Assault in Media

: A Comparison of Indian Print and Digital Newspapers

Abstract

This thesis examines how sexual assaults against Savarna and Asavarna women are represented in Indian English-language newspapers. The primary objective of this thesis is to compare traditional print-affiliated outlets and independent digital platforms to assess differences in visibility, framing, and sourcing. This objective has been fulfilled by answering three research questions: (1) Is there a quantifiable difference in coverage of Savarna versus Asavarna women? (2) Does the language used differ between these groups? (3) Are there measurable differences between traditional and digital outlets?
Grounded in a socially constructivist ontology and interpretivist epistemology, the study draws on Critical Race Theory, Intersectional Feminist Theory, Agenda-Setting Theory, and Muted Group Theory to interpret findings and to develop the Caste-Mediated Visibility Framework (CMVF), a new framework for future research on caste and media representation.
This thesis also develops and applies a systematic triangulation design — integrating quantitative content analysis and qualitative discourse analysis on the same dataset — to identify measurable trends in representation and to interpret the linguistic and discursive strategies that underpin them. A distinctive methodological contribution is the development of a Robotic Process Automation (RPA) workflow that collected over 3,000 articles from 10 major outlets between August 2023 and August 2024. This unique use of automation expands dataset scale, ensures sampling consistency, and enables a structured integration of analytical perspectives.
The findings reveal that Savarna women are disproportionately represented as sympathetic victims, Muslim men are overrepresented as perpetrators, and Dalit and Adivasi women are often marginalised or omitted. Institutional and political voices dominate news sources, while survivor perspectives are underrepresented. Digital outlets depart from these patterns more often than traditional newspapers but do so inconsistently, highlighting the persistence of entrenched representational hierarchies.

Date of Award	5 May 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Portsmouth
Supervisor	Sukh Hamilton (Supervisor) & Tamsin Bradley (Supervisor)