Representation of Rape Victims and Perpetrators in Thai News Articles and its Implications for Rape Myths
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Abstract
In this paper, we explore how perpetrators and victims are represented in Thai online news articles where the topic is rape. The articles were written in English and we analysed them through Halliday’s view on Transitivity and van Leeuwen’s approach to participant roles via his Social Actor Framework (i.e., we used a text linguistics approach to analyse clausal- and phrasal-level features of discourse based on Systemic Functional Linguistics). Our data consisted of thirty online news articles (10 each) from three popular Thai news outlets: Bangkok Post, The Nation, and Khaosod English. Findings revealed specific linguistic patterns were used to represent victims and perpetrators in news stories where rape was the topic. Namely, material processes were most frequently used to represent perpetrators as active agents and victims as being passive. It was also found that perpetrators and victims were mainly described through the category of Functionalization; in other words, in terms of an activity or something they do as well as classification in terms of age, gender, and race. The main difference in the representation between these two social groups was the use of Nomination and Physical Identification. Based on our findings, we shed light on the implications for certain rape myths and ideologies, especially the myth of blaming victims for a rape.
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