GENDER-BASED VIOLENCE (GBV) IN THE NEW NORMAL
No Thumbnail Available
Date
2023
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Corpus Intellectual
Abstract
Gender-based violence has become a social issue
that calls for appropriate media coverage to highlight
its threat to society. There have been more cases of
rape, physical abuse, domestic violence, and sexual
assault/exploitation, all of which have received little
to no media attention. Hence, this paper examined
Gender-based Violence in the New Normal: a
Comparative Analysis of Selected Nigerian
Newspaper's Coverage. The objective of this study is
to ascertain the frequency of gender-based violence
and comparatively analyse gender-based violence in
the two selected newspapers: The Punch and The
Guardian newspapers, which were purposively
selected for the study. The Agenda Setting theory was
adopted to understand how much importance the
media places on issues to shape the public discussion.
A quantitative analysis design was adopted for the
study, and a coding sheet was used for data
collection. To establish a comparative analysis of
gender-based violence reports, Saturday newspapers
from July to December 2019 (the period just before
the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic) and January to
June 2022 (the most recent publications) are selected
for this study. The coverage of gender-based violence
cases in selected Nigerian newspapers varied
significantly between 2019 and 2022. As a result, more
cases of sexual gender-based violence were
reported in the selected newspapers in 2019, while
more cases of physical gender-based violence were
reported in 2022. Findings also revealed that, in terms
of gender-based violence cases, the Punch
newspaper outweighed the Guardian newspaper
between 2019 and 2022.