Medusa: Image of control of women suffering gender violence in sites of Cuiabá (Brasil)

Abstract

This article is part of a master's degree research, which is in progress, in the adjustment phase that was suggested by the qualification committee, at the end of 2023. The main objective is to analyze how women who are victims of gender-based violence, whether in a domestic environment or public, are represented by the online press of Cuiabá, capital of the state of Mato Grosso (Brazil), based on journalistic articles published on the Olhar Direto and FolhaMax websites. It also aims to identify images of control of women who suffer gender-based violence in the articles published by the selected websites, understand how gender inequalities are present in articles about women who suffer gender-based violence, and reflect on the influence of agenda-setting processes, gathering and producing news. The methodology includes an intersectional perspective (Collins & Bilge, 2021; Carneiro, 2019), understanding that other markers, such as race and social class, interfere with how women are affected by gender-based violence. It also uses exploratory research (Bonin, 2010), essential for the corpus definition phase and identification of coding units and analysis categories. The research is structured on content analysis (Bardin, 2011) linked to control images (Collins, 2019; Bueno, 2020), considering that the categorization process needs to be intertwined with the concept of control images. This analysis is based on 40 articles from each website, corresponding to the periods from May 19 to 31, 2022 on FolhaMax, and from May 14 to 31, 2022, on Olhar Direto. This corpus was the amount categorized for presentation to the qualification panel. The search on the websites was done manually, based on the total history of articles published in the FolhaMax Police editorship and in the Cidades do Olhar Direto editorship, in the month of May 2022, which generated a pre-selection of articles that addressed cases of violence involving women. The links were saved in a Word file and went through a new filter when transferring the data to the Excel tables, aiming to organize the coding units. This filter occurred as a result of a more careful reading that led to the elimination of some articles that did not specifically deal with gender-based violence. In total, each spreadsheet (one for each site) has 25 columns that contain coding units, ranging from A to Y. Columns from A to E are reserved for the date of publication, editorship, title, hat, and caption. The others, starting from F to Y, are: Type of Crime, Identity of the Victim, Gender of the Victim, Age Range of the Victim, Race/Ethnicity of the Victim, Qualitative Characteristics of the Victim, Identity of the Suspect, Gender of the Suspect, Range Age of the Suspect, Race/Ethnicity of the Suspect, Qualitative Characteristics of the Suspect, Image, Passive Voice, Use of the Alleged, Motivation, Source, Signed Material, Gender of the Author, Links and Development. Based on the results found in the corpus of this article, I arrived at five categories of analysis. They are: predominant types of violence; treatment given to victims