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LITERATURE & MEDIA

Posts tagged sexual abuse
Representations of Child Sexual Abuse in Jamaica: A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Study of Popular News Media

By Tatyana Karpenko-Seccombe , Kenisha Nelson , Christine Fray , Roxanne Harvey , Karyl Powell-Booth; Adele Jones , Nadia Wager and Xiaomin Sheng

News media shape public opinion on social issues such as child sexual abuse (CSA), using particular language to foreground, marginalize or legitimize certain viewpoints. Given the prevalence of CSA and the impact of violence against children in Jamaica, there is a need to examine the representation of children and their experience of violence in the news media, which remain the main source of information about such abuse for much of the population. The study aims to analyze accounts of CSA in Jamaican newspapers in order to show how different representations impact public understanding of CSA. This study offers a new perspective around child abuse by using an eight-million word corpus from articles over a three-year period (2018- 2020).

The study argues that media reports often fail to conceptualise and represent accurately children who have experienced abuse. Representations of children are generic, their experiences often reduced to statistical summaries. Corpus analysis uncovered the use of terms which normalize sexual abuse. From the reader’s perspective, there was little emotional connection to the child or the child’s experience. The newspapers rarely report first-hand survivors’ experience of abuse, depriving these children of a voice. Instead, a marked preference is given to institutional voices. An issue of concern is a tendency to sensationalism with disproportionate attention given to cases involving celebrities.

By exposing these problems, the authors hope that news media in Jamaica can play a more positive role in heightening awareness around child abuse and allowing the voices of victims/ survivors to be heard.

Basel, SWIT: MDPI Books, 2022. 98p.

Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary

By Régine Michelle Jean-Charles.

This book explores the relationship between rape and narratives of violence in francophone literature and culture. The book offers ways to account for the raped bodies beneath the conflicts of slavery, genocide, dictatorship, natural disasters and war—and to examine why doing so is necessary. Through a feminist analysis of the rhetoric and representation of rape in francophone African and Caribbean cultural production, Conflict Bodies examines theoretical, visual, and literary texts that challenge the dominant views of postcolonial violence. Using an interdisciplinary and comparative framework to consider different contexts—Haiti, Guadeloupe, Rwanda, and Democratic Republic of the Congo—Régine Michelle Jean-Charles illuminates how analyzing survivors’ subjectivities, stories, and embodied experiences provides a nuanced understanding of what is at stake in rape representation. Referencing theories from francophone literary studies, transnational black feminisms, and rape cultural criticism to analyze novels, film, photography, drama, and documentaries, Jean-Charles argues that in today’s global climate—where one in three women worldwide has been raped, rape is being used as a tool of war, and rape myths circulate with vehemence—traditional “scripts of violence” that fail to account for sexual violence demand refusal, re-thinking, and re-imagining.

Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2014. 335p.