A Contrastive Study of English and Spanish Campaigns against Domestic Violence

Abstract

In recent times, domestic violence has become an important cause of concern in different countries and many campaigns against domestic violence have been launched in order to try to fight against it and to increase public awareness. In the area of Linguistics, some studies have dealt with the study of domestic violence and other related topics such as sexual abuse or victimization (Cotterill 2001; Erlich 2001; Michelle and Weaver 2003; Núñez-Perucha 2004a, 2006; Frazer and Miller 2009; Wheeler 2009; Stokoe 2010; Enk and McDaniel 2012; Lockwood et al. 2012). However, less attention has been paid to the analysis of domestic violence as it takes shape in campaigns against domestic violence (but see Maíz-Arévalo 2008) and there seem to be no studies comparing the representation of domestic violence in campaigns in two or more languages. Thus, this piece of research focuses on the analysis of several campaigns against domestic violence launched in the UK and in Spain between 2006 and 2011, combining metaphor theories and aspects of Critical Discourse Analysis. This study offers a contrastive study of how domestic violence is represented and how subjects are positioned in English and Spanish posters against domestic violence. In order to do this, it examines the metaphorical representations of domestic violence and other non-metaphorical representations from a multimodal perspective, as well as showing how the target audience of them is addressed, taking into account for instance, the role of lexis, the use of pronouns and the role of intertextuality. The results show that the posters of both corpora highlight certain aspects of domestic violence by means of the relationship between verbal and visual modes. Moreover, the analysis suggests that some of the posters of both corpora are intertextually built and that domestic violence in both corpora is mainly represented as having a female victim.