A Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis of Social Actors and Actions in Newspaper Reportage on Domestic Violence in Nigeria

Abstract Media representations of domestic violence significantly shape societal perceptions of gender roles and the dynamics of victimhood and perpetration. Despite ongoing research on domestic violence in Nigeria, a notable gap remains in understanding how male and female social actors are represented in the context of domestic violence. This study aims to fill that gap through a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of media coverage on domestic violence in Nigeria over a decade (2013–2023), a period sufficiently long to derive meaningful conclusions about the evolution of gender representation in media narratives. Utilising van Leeuwen’s socio-semantic framework, complemented by M.A.K. Halliday’s Transitivity system, the study revealed that Nigerian newspapers predominantly represents female social actors as victims, while male social actors are more frequently depicted as aggressors and, less often, as victims of domestic violence. These findings indicate that media narratives contribute to a distorted public perception of domestic violence, reinforcing entrenched gender biases.