Abstract
ABSTRACTThis study addresses the need for more research on news media representations of sexual assault within Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). It focuses on the discursive links between victim-blaming in mainstream news coverage, on the one hand, and a neoliberal ideology that backgrounds structural issues while implicitly emphasizing an ethic of ‘personal responsibility’ for risk-management, on the other. The existing research in feminist media studies points to the way that media misrepresent gendered crime by individualizing cases and focusing on victim behaviour rather than connecting sexual assault to systemic social issues based on power imbalance. Using coverage of the highly publicized 2013 Steubenville, Ohio rape as a case study, this article builds on existing research by performing a systematized, grammar-based analysis of transitivity and agency in news reports and demonstrating their often subtle connection with neoliberal notions of victimization and risk that align with the interests of perpetrators, especially when they are privileged social actors (in the Steubenville case and many other recent cases in the U.S., revenue-securing male athletes) while placing the onus on victims, whose agency is used to imply blame.
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