Language, Power, and the Media in the Portrayal of Wartime Sexual Violence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sexual violence has increasingly been recognised – and framed – as a war crime. This essay seeks to unpack the normative and epistemological elements of this discourse. The literature is dominated by peacetime studies of gender and language which fail to analyse elements of shock and labels in the construction of the actors at play. This paper seeks to understand how language, power and media work together to infantilize women and create an implicit dichotomy of victims and survivors. Drawing on critical feminist and post-structural theories, it is argued that media agents play a significant role in shaping perception and defining policy on wartime rape, through language patterns and themes. It is concluded that the language employed by news articles contributes to the gendered socialization of wartime rape. The argument is illustrated by a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of two news channels, Al Jazeera and Fox News, which seeks to identify the common discursive themes and demonstrates that the rhetoric employed is self-perpetuating and is conducive to gendered assumptions and shortcomings.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".