Research report submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the
Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Art (Journalism and Media Studies), Johannesburg, 2016 / Rape is a predominant crime and a social issue in South Africa today. South Africa’s
incidence of rape is among the highest in the world. Identifying and understanding the
dominant rape narratives in news media is useful in pinpointing how the media represents the
crime of rape. It is understood through agenda-setting theory that news media plays an
important role in how topics come onto the national agenda, giving news media a particular
influence in society. Further, through discourse analysis and narrative theories, research has
shown how what people read and hear can influence their understanding of those matters, and
can drive social change or maintain the stability of social structures. Some theorists take this
further, arguing that narrative fundamentally informs how humans make sense of the world,
that reality is discursively constructed. The research below attempts to access, reveal and
unpack these dominant narratives as they pertain to rape, using a combination of corpusbased
analysis and critical discourse analysis techniques on two corpora of South African
newspaper text from the first quarter of 2013, and tied to a specific case study, the rape and
murder of Anene Booysen. The resultant findings also provide a snapshot of the dominant
ideology and social practices in South Africa over the time period studied, as discourse and
narrative are implicitly tied to power in society / GR2017
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:wits/oai:wiredspace.wits.ac.za:10539/21997 |
| Date | January 2016 |
| Creators | Ferreira, Kate |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | Online resource (183 pages), application/pdf, application/pdf |
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