Investigating character construal of rape victims in Pakistani news reporting

This paper investigates how rape victims and perpetrators are portrayed in Pakistani news reporting, with the assumption that the linguistic choices which are significant to construct any discourses within a coherent framework reflect the underlying ideology of the journalists. From the perspective of gender and language, an issue worth exploring is how womenʹs portrayal in the media construes gender inequality and sexual violence. A discourse analysis using transitivity, the cline of dynamism and naming analysis explores the patterning of roles that newspaper writers assign to the participants in a corpus of newspaper reports of rape in Pakistan. Clear differences in reporting between two newspapers are revealed, with one focusing more on the crime and the other on the participants.