Violence against women in the news. Linguistic choices in articles from leading UK newspapers before and after the #MeToo phenomenon.

The aim of this study is to analyze the way in which the media, and in particular the press, can, through precise stylistic and lexical choices, convey messages with particular ideological connotations able to influence the opinion of the users of the medium itself. Specifically, the research will focus on the analysis of articles published between 2015 and 2019 in two of the major British newspapers, The Independent and The Guardian, concerning cases of sexual violence perpetrated by men on women, highlighting the cases in which particular lexical and stylistic choices lend themselves to pass on gender stereotypes or suggest the so-called "victim blaming". The purpose of this paper is also to assess if and how the so called #MeToo phenomenon determined any significant changes in the way these violent events are represented by considering articles published between 2015 and 2017, before this mass phenomenon took place, and comparing them to articles published from 2017 to 2019. The project is based on two different research modalities: a quantitative one, which counts in numerical terms the presence or absence of certain words within the totality of the articles, and a qualitative one, which is a reflection and a critical analysis on the structure of the discourse. In all, 278 articles were searched for the presence of relevant linguistic choices and a comparison between articles published before and after 2017 has been drawn. Upon completion of the quantitative research, it was found that there was a slight decrease in the frequency of blaming incidents against victims during the year 2017, followed by a gradual increase over the next two years.