Discursive Construction of Gender-Based Violence: A Corpus-Assisted Feminist Analysis of Pakistani Media
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20854240
Abstract
The deeply entrenched patriarchal social system in Pakistan has created linguistic and social boundaries for women’s agency, which is the source of violence against women (Saba et al., 2024). The study adopts Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis (CACDA) and Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA) methods to investigate changes in patriarchy’s mindsets and how to transform society during the period 2020-2026. The research employs a multi-platform digital corpus comprising more than 1,500,000 tokens from the mainstream media outlets (Dawn, The News International, The Express Tribune) and more than 1,000,000 tokens from digital advocacy discourse, as produced by inputs from blogs of NGOs and social media platforms (Ahmed et al. 2024; Iftikhar & Yaqoob 2025). The methodology, keywords, collocations and transitivity analysis reveal the linguistic encoding process and the resistance to power. The results indicate that, in the mainstream media, the victim-blaming framing and patterns of agentless transitivity (where the passive voice takes the woman as its subject) are used consistently in such a manner that it suggests violence is an isolated incident, instead of a systemic act (Ghaffar & Siddique, 2026; Khurshid et al., 2025; Rathore et al., 2025). Digital advocacy discourse, on the other hand, uses active verbs and legal references to tackle structural inequalities and position women as agents of change (Iftikhar & Yaqoob, 2025). However, there is a clear shift observed from 2024 that more traditional “victim”-based vocabulary and narratives are progressively being replaced with “survivor-centric” terminology and narratives, and “gender-based violence” has been superseded by “domestic issues” (Bashir et al., 2025; Imran & Noor, 2026). This change is an indicator of a “sociopolitical rupture” in digital environments that confronts entrenched misogyny, providing a tangible foundation for media literacy and policy reform (Wali et al., 2025). Finally, the study shows that the traditional Press language remains patriarchal. While the digital Press, on the
contrary, is trying to counter the language of patriarchy in order to change the discourse of violence in Pakistan.
Keywords: Corpus-Assisted CDA, Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis, Patriarchy,
Transitivity, Gender-Based Violence, Pakistan Media Framing
