Discursive Frames of Domestic Violence Against Women and Child Abuse in the Russian Newspapers, 2013-2023

This paper is focused on the representation of domestic violence against women and child abuse in mass media in Russia. The quantitative and qualitative analysis of the main Russian newspapers was conducted using the Critical Discourse Analysis approach. The results show that contradictory to the official statistics, the media articles prefer the publicise cases of child abuse over the violence against women. The findings show that there are two main aspects in the media representation of domestic violence - the sensitivity and the informal nature of the actors' relationships. The first aspect implies the publication of the most acute stories, where the violent actions of the aggressor fall under a criminal article and guilt from the point of view of society can be easily justified. At the same time, in the description of the aggressors, one can find references to their ethnicity, citizenship or criminal record. Thus, domestic violence is considered as cases uncharacteristic of the life of “ordinary” people, associated with the wrongness of the actors of domestic violence themselves. In this regard, domestic violence has the character of an informal resolution, where the victims themselves or those involved from a third party (relatives, neighbors) must provide information about what happened. Moreover, informality, which implies the self-resolution of conflicts, leads to non-interference before the direct commission of violent acts, even taking into account the obvious possibility of their implementation, which explains the low potential for the prevention of domestic violence. Although throughout the years in the selected period the media reinforced harmful stereotypes, by blaming the victim, trivializing violent behavior of aggressors and ignores structural context that is responsible for reproducing the domestic violence, there was some increase in mentions of structural reasons to be blamed for domestic violence.