Lexico-grammatical Analysis of Media Representation of Men in Rape Coverage

Abstract

This study seeks to examine the representation of men in rape coverage produced by Thai media. The analysis is theoretically triangulated between Biber et al.’s markers of stance and Mellado’s journalistic role performance. Methodologically, corpus-assisted discourse analysis is adopted. The corpus consists of 167 news articles with a total number of 126,150 words. The period of publication ranges from 2007 to 2022. Findings indicate that male perpetrators are discursively vilified through discourse structures which signify augmented agency to inflict harm upon victims. To illustrate, the lexical item rape is made to occur simultaneously with other material verb processes which intensify an act of violence such as bludgeon and kill. In contrast, the agency of male victims is downplayed. This is evidenced in the fact that their voice is expressed through other parties such as witnesses and NGO officers instead of emanating from the victims themselves. Possible ways to humanise the representation are discussed.