Distorted realities: Gender bias in Chinese news representations of wives and husbands in domestic violence articles

Domestic violence affects one in three women in the world. How the public perceive and address this issue is much shaped by media reports. However, few studies have examined media representations of domestic violence in China. To fill this gap, this study applies corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis to investigate representations of wives and husbands in articles about domestic violence. The analysis identified four main patterns: (a) in domestic homicides, wives are over-represented as intentional homicide offenders, while husbands are represented as accidental killers; (b) in non-lethal violence, wives as perpetrators are trivialized, whereas husbands as victims are mocked; (c) in divorce-related cases, wives’ agency is undermined and their judicial struggles are normalized; (d) in infidelity-related cases, husbands’ misconduct is tolerated to an extent, with blame frequently shifted to wives. These findings shed light on the gendered discourse of domestic violence and contribute to debates on future judicial reforms and policies to better address domestic violence.