Discursive Constructions of Sexual Harassment in Policy Discourse: A Critical Analysis of Nigeria's 2019 Anti-Sexual Harassment Bill

The paper engages in an ideological analysis and a critique of the discourse structures of the Anti-Sexual Harassment Prohibition Bill enacted in 2019 by Nigeria’s National Assembly for the purpose of preventing sexual harassment of students in Nigerian academia. This study argues that the Bill’s (co)sponsors’ ideological belief systems influence and control the discourse structures of the text. Situated within the framework of van Dijk’s (1998) socio-cognitive ideological square model, the study explores the discourse structures of the legal text and analyses how ideologies are expressed in the elicited structures. Findings reveal that compelling headlining, topicalisation, goal-foregrounding, agency obscuration, lexicalisation, syntactic structures, implicitness and vagueness are discourse structures observable in the Bill. These structures ideologically represent the relations between “students” and “educators” in terms of Us versus Them in which the students are subtly associated with positive (chaste) properties and their educators with bad (lechery) properties. By representing the students as the vulnerable group, the Bill expresses ingroup-solidarity for the seeming defenceless students. This study concludes that the Bill is a discursive site for the subtle construction of ideologically polarised group opinion which favours students but is biased against educators.