Toward a Shared Language of Domestic Violence

Domestic violence referring to a range of violent, coercive, and controlling behaviors perpetrated mostly by men against women in the context of family or intimate relationships is a deep-rooted social problem with devastating impacts. A lack of shared understanding of domestic violence is a barrier to preventing this social problem in the global world. Thus, a clear terminology of domestic violence is essential to frame what is understood as domestic violence. Based on the fact that language is a central focus of establishing a shared understanding of domestic violence, the present corpus-based study intends to identify the common words of domestic violence and their collocations in the international news. Frequency-based and collocation window approaches were used for the identification process. In total, 45 common words of domestic violence about participants, locations, type, and social and legal aspects were found, which confirmed one of the properties of a shared language. A limited variety of common collocations of these words were observed in the data. New understandings of the dynamics of domestic violence may be revealed through further studies concentrating on linguistic variations of the issue in relation to gender, culture, and sector.