From the uncertainty of violence to life after abuse: Discursive transitions among female survivors of Intimate Partner Violence in online contexts
Abstract
Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) is undoubtedly one of the most worrying concerns in today’s global societies. Due to the many intertwined factors that explain the persistence of this reality among people from all sorts of backgrounds, finding a uniform strategy to cope with this social issue is far from unproblematic. In this study, I contribute to a growing field of research that examines the discourse of female survivors of IPV in online contexts. The main objective is to identify relevant linguistic patterns used by women to represent themselves and their perpetrators in a publicly-available online forum. More specifically, I seek to ascertain the discursive traits that characterise women in an initial stage in contrast to a final stage within an abusive relationship. To this end, I adopt a Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies approach in a digital corpus of around 136,000 words, which are analysed with the software tool Sketch Engine. Findings show the most salient discursive traits that characterise IPV online discourse. Additionally, and drawing on verb patterns ascertained in the corpus and their semantic categorisation, I also connect linguistic textual evidence to the power imbalances that sustain this social phenomenon.
Downloads
Metrics
References
Ali, Parveen Azam and Paul B. Naylor. 2013. Intimate partner violence: A narrative review of the feminist, social and ecological explanations for its causation. Aggression and Violent Behavior 18/6: 611–619.
Baker, Paul. 2014. Using Corpora to Analyze Gender. London: Bloomsbury.
Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad and Edward Finegan. 1999. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Longman.
Bou-Franch, Patricia and Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich. 2014. Gender ideology and social identity processes in online language aggression against women. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 2/2: 226–248.
Bolander, Brook and Miriam A. Locher. 2014. Doing sociolinguistic research on computer-mediated data: A review of four methodological issues. Discourse, Context & Media 3: 14¬–26.
Busso, Lucia, Claudia Roberta Combei and Ottavia Tordini. 2020. A corpus-based study on the representation of gender-based violence in Italian media. Quaderni del Comitato Unico di Garanzia dell’Università Ca’Foscari Venezia 1: 39–58.
Campbell, Andrew M., Ralph A. Hicks, Shannon L. Thompson and Sarah E. Wiehe. 2020. Characteristics of intimate partner violence incidents and the environments in which they occur: Victim reports to responding law enforcement officers. Journal of Interpersonal Violence 35/13–14: 2583–2606.
Chester, David S. and C. Nathan DeWall. 2018. The roots of intimate partner violence. Current Opinion in Psychology 19: 55–59.
Chu, Tsz Hang, Youzhen Su, Hanxiao Kong, Jingyuan Shi and Xiaohui Wang. 2021. Online social support for intimate partner violence victims in China: Quantitative and automatic content analysis. Violence Against Women 27/3–4: 339–358.
Evans, Megan L., Margo Lindauer and Maureen E. Farrell. 2020. A pandemic within a pandemic—Intimate partner violence during Covid-19. New England Journal of Medicine 383/24: 2302–2304.
Formato, Federica. 2019. Gender, Discourse and Ideology in Italian. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Franzén, Anna and Karin Aronsson. 2018. ‘Then she got a spanking’: Social accountability and narrative versions in social workers’ courtroom testimonies. Discourse Studies 20/5: 577–597.
Gabrielatos, Costas. 2018. Keyness analysis: Nature, metrics and techniques. In Charlotte Taylor and Anna Marchi eds. Corpus Approaches to Discourse: A Critical Review. London: Routledge, 225–258.
García-Moreno, Claudia and Charlotte Watts. 2011. Violence against women: An urgent public health priority. Bulletin of the World Health Organization 89/1–2.
Gillespie, Lane Kirkland, Tara N. Richards, Eugena M. Givens and M. Dwayne Smith. 2013. Framing deadly domestic violence: Why the media’s spin matters in newspaper coverage of femicide. Violence Against Women 19/2: 222–245.
Hester, Marianne. 2013. Who does what to whom? Gender and domestic violence perpetrators in English police records. European Journal of Criminology 10/5: 623–637.
Holmes, Danielle, George W. Alpers, Tasneem Ismailji, Catherine Classen, Talor Wales, Valerie Cheasty, Andrew Miller and Cheryl Koopman. 2007. Cognitive and emotional processing in narratives of women abused by intimate partners. Violence Against Women 13/11: 1192–1205.
Jakubíček, Miloš, Adam Kilgarriff, Vojtěch Kovář, Pavel Rychlý and Vít Suchomel. 2013. The TenTen corpus family. Paper delivered at the 7th International Corpus Linguistics Conference. Lancaster: University of Lancaster.
Kilgarriff, Adam, Vít Baisa, Jan Bušta, Miloš Jakubíček, Vojtěch Kovář, Jan Michelfeit, Pavel Rychlý and Vít Suchomel. 2014. The Sketch Engine: Ten years on. Lexicography 1/1: 7–36.
Kilgore, Christopher D., Courtney Cronley and Peter Lehmann. 2015. Social construction of intimate partner violence: A brief report on quantitative grammatical analysis. Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma 24/10: 1123–1133.
Kunilovskaya, Maria and Marina Koviazina. 2017. Sketch Engine: A toolbox for linguistic discovery. Jazykovedny Casopis 68/3: 503–507.
Lawson, Jennifer. 2012. Sociological theories of intimate partner violence. Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment 22/5: 572–590.
Leitão, Roxanne. 2019. Technology-facilitated intimate partner abuse: A qualitative analysis of data from online domestic abuse forums. Human–Computer Interaction 1–40.
Lloyd, Michele and Shula Ramon. 2017. Smoke and mirrors: UK newspaper representations of intimate partner domestic violence. Violence against Women 23/1: 114–139.
Macalister, John. 2011. Flower-girl and bugler-boy no more: Changing gender representation in writing for children. Corpora 6/1: 25–44.
Maíz-Arévalo, Carmen and Alfonso Sánchez-Moya. 2017. ‘I know how you feel’: Multifaceted insights into the expression of support strategies in computer-mediated-communication. EPiC Series in Language and Linguistics 2: 214–223.
Markham, Annette N. and Elizabeth A. Buchanan. 2015. Internet research: Ethical concerns. In James D. Wright ed. International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 606–613.
Miltra, Ananda. 2004. Voices of the marginalized on the Internet: Examples from a website for women of South Asia. Journal of Communication 54/3: 492–510.
Nacey, Susan. 2020. Figurative production in a computer-mediated discussion forum. In John Barnden and Andrew Gargett eds. Producing Figurative Expression: Theoretical, Experimental and Practical Perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 363–388.
Norberg, Cathrine. 2016. Naughty boys and sexy girls: The representation of young individuals in a web-based corpus of English. Journal of English Linguistics 44/4: 291–317.
Palomino-Manjón, Patricia. 2020. Feminist activism on Twitter: The discursive construction of sexual violence and victim-survivors in #WhyIDidntReport. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict. https://benjamins.com/catalog/jlac.00049.pal. (4 April 2021.)
Partington, Alan, Alison Duguid and Charlotte Taylor. 2013. Patterns and Meanings in Discourse: Theory and Practice in Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Pendry, Louise F. and Jessica Salvatore. 2015. Individual and social benefits of online discussion forums. Computers in Human Behavior 50: 211–220.
Pennebaker, James W., Roger J. Booth and Martha E. Francis. 2007. Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC): LIWC2007. http://liwc.wpengine.com/(4 April 2021.)
Rollè, Luca, Giulia Giardina, Angela M. Caldarera, Eva Gerino and Piera Brustia. 2018. When intimate partner violence meets same sex couples: A review of same sex intimate partner violence. Frontiers in Psychology 9/1506: 1–13.
Sánchez-Moya, Alfonso. 2017. Corpus-driven insights into the discourse of women survivors of Intimate Partner Violence. Quaderns de Filología. Estudis Lingüístics 22: 215–243.
Sánchez-Moya, Alfonso. 2019a. Violence, media, and gender biases. In Juana I. Marín-Arrese, María Luisa Blanco Gómez, Elena Domínguez Romero, Sergio Ferrer Navas, Carmen Maíz Arévalo, Victoria Martín de la Rosa, María Ángeles Martínez Martínez, Begoña Núñez Perucha and Alfonso Sánchez Moya eds. Discourse, Meaning and Communication. Madrid: Escolar y Mayo Editores, 113–119.
Sánchez-Moya, Alfonso. 2019b. Exploring Digital Discourse on Intimate Partner Violence: A Socio-Cognitive Approach. Madrid/Amsterdam: Universidad Complutense de Madrid and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam dissertation.
Sánchez-Moya, Alfonso. 2021. How does violence-motivated online discourse differ from its non-violent counterpart? Insights from a CADS approach. In Miguel Fuster-Márquez, José Santaemilia, Carmen Gregori-Signes and Paula Rodríguez-Abruñeiras eds. Exploring Discourse and Ideology through Corpora. Bern: Peter Lang, 167–189.
Santaemilia, José and Sergio Maruenda-Bataller. 2016. The linguistic representation of gender violence in (written) media discourse. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 2/2: 249–273.
Smith, Sharon G., Xinjian Zhang, Kathleen C. Basile, Melissa T. Merrick, Jing Wang, Marcie-jo Kresnow and Jieru Chen. 2018. The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey: 2015 Data Brief–Updated Release. Atlanta: National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. Division of Violence Prevention.
Tani, Franca, Carole Peterson and Martina Smorti. 2016. The words of violence: Autobiographical narratives of abused women. Journal of Family Violence 31/7: 885–896.
Tausczik, Yla R. and James W. Pennebaker. 2010. The psychological meaning of words: LIWC and computerized text analysis methods. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 29/1: 24–54.
UNODC. 2018. Global Study on Homicide 2018. Vienna: United Nations.
Van Gelder, Nicole E., Amber Peterman, Alina Potts, Megan O’Donnell, Kelly Thompson, Niyati Shah and Sabine Oertelt-Prigione. 2020. COVID-19: Reducing the risk of infection might increase the risk of intimate partner violence. EClinicalMedicine 21.
Van Leeuwen, Theo. 2008. Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Copyright (c) 2021 Research in Corpus Linguistics
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
