📖 ABSTRACT/OVERVIEW
This study presents a feminist critical discourse analysis of Nigerian news media coverage of gender-based violence between 2020 and 2024, making an original contribution to the intersection of feminist linguistics, critical discourse analysis, and media studies in the Nigerian context. Gender-based violence has been declared a national emergency in Nigeria, and media discourse plays a significant role in shaping public understanding, institutional response, and victim support norms, yet systematic feminist linguistic analysis of Nigerian GBV media coverage has not been undertaken. The research integrates feminist critical discourse analysis with narrative analysis and appraisal theory to examine a corpus of 400 news reports drawn from national online and print media sources. The analysis examines victim and perpetrator naming and attribution patterns, agency configurations in grammatical structures describing violence, evaluative language choices, expert voice selection, and the framing of GBV as individual or structural phenomenon. Findings document persistent patterns of victim-blaming discourse through grammatical agency reduction, passive construction use for perpetrator actions, and lexical choices that sexualise victims in reporting. Structural explanations for GBV receive significantly less discursive space than individual pathology framings across all media types sampled. The study also documents a post-2020 discursive shift in coverage of femicide cases, with activist-organised protest events associated with temporarily more critical framing. The research makes an original contribution to feminist media linguistics and recommends mandatory gender-sensitive journalism training for Nigerian reporters. Keywords: feminist critical discourse analysis, gender-based violence, Nigerian media, news discourse, appraisal theory.
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