FRAMING GENDER-BASED VIOLENCE IN PAKISTANI ENGLISH NEWSPAPERS: GENDER REPRESENTATION, VICTIMIZATION AND PATRIARCHAL STEREOTYPES

This article analyzes the framing of crimes against women in Pakistani English language newspapers and how the frequent frames construct gendered identities. The study is based on a qualitative content analysis of 30 news reports on rape, honour killing, domestic violence, harassment and other forms of gender-based victimisation from Dawn and The News between August 2022 and April 2023 and uses Framing Theory as a lens to analyse the representation of these offences. The corpus consists of 30 reports (15 from each newspaper) picked up from the official websites of the newspapers, selected purposively. The findings reveal that apparently neutral and restrained reporting is framed around recurring notions of victimisation, honour-based violence, domestic violence, and law enforcement. The corpus contains 12 rape-related cases (40%), six honor-killing cases (20%), five domestic-violence killing cases (16.7%), and nine headlines that explicitly highlight law-enforcement performance; these categories are not mutually exclusive. The event-specific frames converge towards a general victimization frame. Female characters are depicted as weak, helpless, submissive, and vulnerable, while male characters are cast in roles of power, control, and authority. The reports generally avoid overt editorial judgment and rely heavily on FIRs, police accounts and statements by victims or alleged perpetrators, yet their selection and framing can still reproduce culturally available gender stereotypes. The article argues that surface-level journalistic neutrality does not eliminate framing effects and recommends more contextualized, gender-sensitive reporting Keywords: Media framing; gender representation; violence against women; victimization; honor killing; gender stereotypes; Pakistani print media