Thirty years of media coverage of gender-based violence

The example of two French newspapers

Abstract

For the past 30 years, the French media have participated in highlighting sexual violence committed against children and women, in the context of discourses on insecurity. Based on a corpus of 2071 articles, published between 1989 and 2019, from two French newspapers, the article identifies the main media peaks and changes in social representations that have emerged. Among sexual violence against minors, those committed by a person unknown to the victim prior to the acts of violence are more publicized in the media during most of the thirty years studied than those relating to incest, contrary to the statistical findings. This is why the visibility of sexual violence can be described as paradoxical. We must wait until women’s voices can be expressed directly on social media for feminist discourse to find a more developed place in the denunciation of sexist and sexual violence, at least for one of the two daily newspapers studied.