Analysing the representation of gender violence in news discourse: quantitative and qualitative insights

This dissertation reviews the topic of violence against women in news discourse. In recent years this issue has gained an extensive visibility, becoming one of the most important topic in the news. Newspapers can contribute in the shaping of the public opinion, therefore, analysing articles on this topic may give us some insights into the way violence against women is perceived and represented nowadays. First the dissertation gives an insight on what is violence against women, on how is taken in consideration by the authorities and also gives a brief description of the UK situation. The analysis done is both quantitative and qualitative. Initially using NOW Corpus it was possible to do a quantitative analysis of collocates of the string ¿sexual assault¿, which was also taken in order to search articles about this topic. Reporting and editing of news are highly influenced by news values, which are what makes a topic newsworthy; therefore, the qualitative analysis uses news values in order to understand what stories about sexual assaults on women can become articles published on the most important UK newspapers.