A Standard Reading of Selected Online Readers’ Comments on Domestic Violence against Men in Nigeria

Abstract

The study performs a standard reading of online readers’ comments on Domestic Violence against Men (henceforth, DVAM). This is with a view to exploring how the readers’ comments develop dialogically to build up threads that depict salient motifs on DVAM in the Nigerian sociocultural domain. The specific objectives of the study are to identify the dialogic developments of threads among the commenters; construe motifs cum shared socio-cultural values in the identified threadal developments; and elicit the rhetorical implications of the threadal developments on the phenomenon of DVAM in Nigeria. The data comprise two purposively selected online news reports on DVAM with their readers' comments, sourced from the news archives of The News and Sahara Reporters. The study adopts the Dialogic Dual Reading Model as the analytical framework. The standard reading of the threadal developments of the readers’ comments in the two selected news reports reveals that a large number of the commenters maintain the ideological stance that DVAM is unjustifiable; some commenters, however, argue that acts of DVAM are often perpetrated in self-defense. This contrary ideological notion of self-defense not only portrays the women-offenders in these cases as victims but also justifies their acts of violence.