Communication (Dec 2023)
De la médiatisation confinée des violences familiales
Abstract
The 2020 pandemic rallied public authorities around the issue of domestic violence, which was exacerbated by various health measures. As there were restrictions on access to public spaces and on physical contact, the aim was no longer simply to make sure that existing measures were working, but to implement the right tools for the context. The research focuses on the coverage of this issue in mainstream broadcast media, based on the hypothesis that the pandemic sparks public debate on domestic violence by destabilizing existing orders, power relationships, authorities, organizations, beliefs, and knowledge. We asked three questions to analyze the media’s approach to the problem: a) Is violence against women being brought to the home? b) Does the expert voice remain relevant throughout the entire period? c) Where do victims fit it? From a methodological perspective, this article is based on a corpus of 772 news items from the main free channels and the spoken news of the main French station (France Inter), broadcast between March 1 and September 1, 2020, compared to the same period in 2019. In a quantitative-qualitative approach, a coding grid was developed to identify themes, categories, and topics.
