Violence Against Women in Pakistan’s English-Language Press: A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Study of Dawn Newspaper Reporting in 2021

Abstract

This study examines how violence against women (VAW) was discursively constructed in Dawn, a leading Pakistani English-language daily, during 2021, a year marked by the murder of Noor Mukadam, a mob assault on a woman near Minar-e-Pakistan and controversy over prime ministerial remarks linking sexual violence to women’s clothing. Drawing on the synergy of corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis, a validated corpus of 361 texts (184,207 tokens) was compiled from a full year of Dawn news output and compared with the remaining 17,681 news texts (9,458,277 tokens). Keyword, social actor, dependency-parsed agency, collocation and concordance analyses were combined with a comparison of news reports and commentary. Dawn constructed VAW predominantly as criminal-justice procedure. Perpetrators were named mainly through legal labels, women through victimhood and kinship, and 60.5% of finite clauses reporting violence were passive, most without an agent. Commentary named men, patriarchy and the state as sources of violence, distanced itself from ‘honour’ and contested victim-blaming, yet shared the passive grammar of news reports. Class appeared as formulaic background in news and as an object of critique in commentary. The newspaper thus both reproduced and challenged dominant gender norms, largely along genre lines.

Keywords: violence against women, corpus-assisted discourse studies, Pakistani English-language press, social actor representation, agency, honour, victim-blaming