Exploring Victimhood and Responsibility in Femicides through Media Narratives

Over the past decade, femicides committed by partners or husbands in Greece and Cyprus have rapidly increased. This rise has attracted intense media attention (Brodie, 2019) and sparked discussions that explore various aspects of the phenomenon (Crenshaw, 1999). Central to these discussions are efforts to prevent femicide and understand its complex dynamics (Corradi & Stockl, 2014).

A key part of prevention involves examining how victimhood is portrayed when understood in a broad sense—from the immediate victim to family and society— and how responsibility is assigned or deflected in media narratives.

This presentation draws on the literature surrounding media representations of femicide and aims to answer two key questions: “how is victimhood portrayed when a femicide occurs?” and, “how is responsibility portrayed, transferred, or silenced through the media narratives?” The selection of online media articles for femicides in Greece and Cyprus for the period 2019-2023 was conducted as follows: a week’s news coverage was constructed for each femicide which means that each femicide is represented in the data base by the articles that were written on a Monday, the articles that were written on Tuesday and so forth. The total number of femicides for this period is 111 for Greece and 29 for Cyprus. The selected articles were coded using Atlas.ti 8 software and analysed through discourse analysis.The coding is based on a matrix that captures discursive elements of victimhood and responsibility.

Preliminary findings indicate that the concept of victimhood is fluid. In some cases, it refers exclusively to the immediate victim-the murdered woman-while in other cases, it expands to include the family, neighbours,or even institutional actors such as police officers and politicians. On the other hand,responsibility is consistently attributed to the perpetrator while institutional factors are rarely held accountable for maintaining a reactive rather than proactive role in addressing femicide.