Gender Violence on television: a discourse analysis

Abstract

Gender violence, defined as any kind of violence towards women due to gender issues, is deeply rotted in societies. It is argued that this kind of violence is linked to socialization instruments, such as communication media. Approaching gender violence as an entertainment object where violence against women becomes a fetish hides the problem, promoting misunderstanding of this situations and of women who experience violence. In this paper, a non-probabilistic convenience sampling was used to select a tv show and a newscast to analyse the discourse about gender violence. It was found a tendency to hide violence towards women. These analysed tv broadcasts show the audience that the only choice for women to escape from violence is legal complaint. However, the tv broadcasts justify systematically the actions of aggressor and questioning the attacked women hiding any violence that have physical consequences.