Transitivity System and Ideological Framing in News Headlines Reporting Gender-based Violence in Nigeria

Abstract

Gender-based violence, encompassing domestic abuse, sexual assault, and femicide, remains an enduring and widespread issue in Nigeria. This study aims to examine the transitivity system and ideology present in news headlines reporting gender-based violence in Nigeria. While adopting Halliday and Matthiessen’s (2014) Ideational Metafunction of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as the theoretical framework, the study uses content analysis method which includes both qualitative and quantitative approaches in the analysis of the data. 20 news headlines each published between May and August, 2022 on the official websites of two prominent mainstream media in Nigeria – The Punch and Nigerian Tribune – are purposively selected for this study, making a total of 40 news headlines. The analysis of transitivity system in The Punch online news revealed that thirty (30) processes are employed in the twenty (20) news headlines depicting crime committed against women in Nigeria selected from the newspaper. Twenty-nine (96.7%) of these processes are material process, while one (3.3%) is behavioural process. The prevailing occurrence of material process is also evident in the news headlines selected from Nigerian Tribune. In Nigerian Tribune, twenty-five (25) processes are deployed across the twenty (20) selected news headlines; material process appears twenty-four times (96%), while verbal process appears only once (4%). The dominant use of material process in the selected news headlines permits both media houses – The Punch and Nigerian Tribune – to identify and describe various physical and violent actions that were taken against Nigerian women, and also to identify actions taken by the law enforcement agencies to ensure justice for the victims of crime. The analysis further highlighted a representation of gender roles and power dynamics by revealing that all the material processes which are related to violence, such as ‘rape’, ‘shot’, ‘abducts’, ‘kills’, and ‘punches’, are linked with the male. Hence, men are portrayed as perpetrators of violent crimes while women are represented as the victims; women are portrayed as vulnerable, gang-raped, raped, shot, killed and stabbed. It was also discovered that women, along with related entities, are often used in news headlines to perform the participant role of goal, thereby implying an ideological representation that positions women as susceptible targets of violent crimes. This study therefore concludes that Nigerian media outlets primarily deploy material processes and goal participant roles of the transitivity system to present an amplified and sensational portrayal of various physical and aggressive actions inflicted upon women and young girls in Nigeria.