Media Portrayal and Perpetuation of Rape Myths: A Systemic Functional Linguistics Analysis of Noor Mukaddam's Case in Pakistani Print Media
Keywords:
Violence against women, Transitivity analysisAbstract
Sexual violence against women has been the focus of research across the globe for decades. Intimate partner violence is one special kind that carries patriarchal socio-cultural beliefs with it governing and perpetuating such form(s) of sexual violence. Women become the victims of rape, torture, mental trauma and even murder. This paper studies sexual violence against women with special reference to Noor Mukaddam’s case and its portrayal in Pakistani print media. Noor was the daughter of a Pakistani ex-diplomat whom Zahir Jaffar, her friend, brutally tortured and beheaded afterwards on 20th July 2021. ‘Transitivity analysis’ and ‘Appraisal’ features of the selected news reports with the help of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) reveal that the print media sometimes misreport the news of sexual violence that may easily go in the favor of the involved perpetrators. Such misreporting may discursively perpetuate rape myths and wrong beliefs having no sound logic. Objective news reporting may help focus on the ‘real issue’ without decentralizing the attention from the crime to the sensational elements.
References
Aijmer, G. (2000). The Idiom of Violence in Imagery and Discourse’, in Aijmer, G. and Abbink, J. (eds.) Meanings of Violence: A Cross Cultural Perspective. Oxford: Berg.
Akram, N., & Yasmin, M. (2023). Sexual violence against women: Global interventions and an evidence from Pakistan. Women's Studies International Forum, 97: 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2023.102691
Bartley, L. V. (2018). Girl A: The truth about the Rochdale sex ring by the individual who stopped them: A CDA of a rape victim’s testimony. Applied Linguistics, 39(3): 352-372.
Bayley, R., Cameron, R., & Lucas, C. (2013). The Oxford handbook of sociolinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Berrington, E., & Jones, H. (2002). Reality vs. myth: Constructions of women's insecurity. Feminist Media Studies, 2(3): 307-323.
Bullock, C. F. (2007). Framing domestic violence fatalities: Coverage by Utah newspapers. Women's Studies in Communication, 30(1): 34-63.
Carll, E. K. (2003). News portrayal of violence and women: Implications for public policy. American Behavioral Scientist, 46(12): 1601-1610.
Carlyle, K. E., Slater, M. D., & Chakroff, J. L. (2008). Newspaper coverage of intimate partner violence: Skewing representations of risk. Journal of Communication, 58(1): 168-186.
Capps, L., & Ochs, E. (1995). Constructing panic: The discourse of agoraphobia. Harvard University Press.
Clark, K. (1992). The linguistics of blame: Representations of women in The Sun's reporting of crimes of sexual violence. In M. Toolan (Ed.) Language, Text and Context. Routledge
Connell, P. (1997). Understanding victimization and agency: Considerations of race, class and gender. Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 20 (2): 115-143.
Crenshaw, K. W. (1994). Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color. Stanford Law Review, 43( 6): 1241-1299.
Das, V. (2000). Violence and subjectivity. California: University of California Press.
Easteal, P., Holland, K., & Judd, K. (2015). Enduring themes and silences in media portrayals of violence against women. Women's Studies International Forum, 48: 103-113. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2014.10.015
Ehrlich, S. (2003). Representing Rape: Language and sexual consent. London: Routledge.
Entman, R. M. (1993). Framing: Toward clarification of a fractured paradigm. Journal of Communication, 43(4): 51-58.
Entman, R. M. (2007). Framing bias: Media in the distribution of power. Journal of Communication, 57(1): 163-173.
Fairclough, N. (1993). Critical discourse analysis and the marketization of public discourse: The universities. Discourse & Society, 4(2): 133-168.
Farmer, P. E., Nizeye, B., Stulac, S., & Keshavjee, S. (2006). Structural violence and clinical medicine. PLoS medicine, 3(10): e449. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0030449
Flood, M., & Pease, B. (2009). Factors influencing attitudes to violence against women. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 10(2): 125-142.
Gillespie, L. K., Richards, T. N., Givens, E. M., & Smith, M. D. (2013). Framing deadly domestic violence: Why the media’s spin matters in newspaper coverage of femicide. Violence against women, 19(2): 222-245.
Halliday, M. A., & Matthiessen, C. (2004). An Introduction to Functional Grammar, 3rd ed. London: Arnold.
Kahn, A. S., Mathie, V. A., & Torgler, C. (1994). Rape scripts and rape acknowledgment. Psychology of women quarterly, 18(1): 53-66.
Kalra, G., & Bhugra, D. (2013). Sexual violence against women: Understanding cross-cultural intersections. Indian journal of psychiatry, 55(3): 244-249.
Lazar, M. M. (2007). Feminist critical discourse analysis: Articulating a feminist discourse praxis. Critical discourse studies, 4(2): 141-164.
Lemish, D. (2007). ‘The politics of minority exclusion in the media: Women image and coverage of violence against them’. In D. Caspi (Ed.), Communication and politics in Israel (pp. 185-207). Jerusalem, Israel: Van Leer Jerusalem Institute.
Meyers, M. (1996). News coverage of violence against women: Engendering blame. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.
Martin, J. R., & White, P. R. (2003). The language of evaluation (Vol. 2). London: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230511910
Morgan, J., & Politoff, V. M. (2012). Victorian print media coverage of violence against women: a longitudinal study. University of Malbourne.
Morgan, J., & Simons, M. (2018). Changing Media Coverage of Violence Against Women: The role of individual cases and individual journalists. Journalism Practice, 12(9): 1165-1182.
Richards, T. N., Kirkland Gillespie, L., & Dwayne Smith, M. (2011). Exploring news coverage of femicide: Does reporting the news add insult to injury? Feminist Criminology, 6(3): 178-202.
Rose, D. S. (1986). " Worse than death": psychodynamics of rape victims and the need for psychotherapy. The American journal of psychiatry, 143(7): 817-824.
Safdar, M. Yasmin, M. (2021). Redefining Pakistani Muslim wifehood in Hamid’s and Shamsie’s fiction. Cogent Arts & Humanities, 8(1): 1-15. https://doi/10.1080/23311983.2021.2001158
Scheufele, D. A. (1999). Framing as a theory of media effects. Journal of Communication, 49(1): 103-122.
Scheufele, D. A. (2000). Agenda-setting, priming, and framing revisited: Another look at cognitive effects of political communication. Mass Communication & Society, 3(2-3): 297-316.
Schmidt, B., & Schröder, I. (2001). Anthropology of violence and conflict. London: Routledge.
Shoham, E. (2009). Reconstructing the Narrative of Rape in the Kibbutz by the Israeli Press. International Journal of Conflict and Violence (IJCV), 3(2): 220-229.
Sunderland, E. M., Hu, X. C., Dassuncao, C., Tokranov, A. K., Wagner, C. C., & Allen, J. G. (2019). A review of the pathways of human exposure to poly-and perfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) and present understanding of health effects. Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology, 29(2): 131-147.
Ward, C. A., & Inserto, F. (1990). Victims of sexual violence: A handbook for helpers. NUS Press.
Watts, C., & Zimmerman, C. (2002). Violence against women: global scope and magnitude. The Lancet, 359(9313): 1232-1237.
Wodak, R. (2001). ‘What CDA is about’. In R. Wodak & M. Meyer, (Eds.), Methods of critical discourse analysis. London: Sage.
Yasmin, M., Masso, I. C., Bukhari, N. H. & Aboubakar, M. (2019). Thespians in print: Gender portrayal in Pakistani English print media. Cogent Arts and Humanities, 6: 1661647, 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1080/23311983.2019.1661647
Young, S. L., & Maguire, K. C. (2003). Talking about sexual violence. Women and Language, 26(2): 40-52.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
![Creative Commons License](http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/4.0/88x31.png)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
You are free to:
- Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format for any purpose, even commercially.
- Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.
- The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.