An Exploration of Animal Metaphors in Gender-Based Violence Campaigns

This article explores the use of animal metaphors in gender-based violence campaigns. It analyzes a purpose-built corpus consisting of 39 public-awareness campaigns that run between 1998 to 2023 across 21 countries that resort to animal metaphors in the representation of the female victim and/or the male abuser. Through the lens of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, the results revealed that campaigns reproduce common zoomorphic tropes associated with existing misogynous and gender-based violence discourses, such as political, legal, mass, and social media, and popular culture. Male batterers are portrayed as aggressive, predatory, dangerous, and controlling through zoomorphic metaphors such as “animals”, “beasts”, “pit bulls”, “vultures”, “roosters”, “octopuses”, and “owls”. Female victims, on the other hand, are sexualized, subjugated, and derided, physically, intellectually, and morally, via comparisons with “bitches”, “vixens”, “cougars”, “cats”, “pigs” and “donkeys”.