Violência contra a mulher: escolhas linguísticas e representações sociais em portais de notícias

Abstract

This study is motivated by the high numbers of violence against women in Brazil and the conception that this form of violence is linked, among other factors, to the transmission of social representations that reinforce the culture of male domination. One of the ways of transmitting social representations, in turn, may be the result of linguistic choices, both in content and organization. Thus, we aim to identify what thoughts society holds about gender roles, victims, aggressors and violence itself and that contribute to the maintenance of violence. For this, the social process of construction of violence against women was contextualized, presenting the transformation process of the feminist movement to the present day and the current panorama of violence against women, through indicators of violence and gender. Then, we present a model of social representations for addressing violence against women in the media, pointing to the role of communication and language in this process. Finally, we empirically explore the social representation of violence against women in the media considering the representation of the social actors involved in the news (victims and aggressors), in a sample consisting of 100 journalistic texts from Brazilian news portals in the period 2018-2019, from in order to identify what are the social representations about violence against women that, in general, the journalistic texts are transmitting to the public and what are the linguistic resources mobilized for that regarding the content and organization of the text. Through this study, we identified the existence of linguistic resources present in the journalistic texts that reinforce the interpretations about victims, aggressors and the violence itself that contribute to the maintenance of this reality.