News Coverage of Domestic Violence in Post-Socialist Hungary: Shifts in Meaning and the Gender Aspect

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses, with the help of a CDA-based, historically comparative multiple case study, how news media portrayals of domestic violence have shifted in Hungary as the country’s sociopolitical structure has changed between 2002 and 2013, and how the aspect of gender has been gradually introduced and recognized as a structural element of violence, in line with shifting constructions of victimhood. It attempts at illustrating how domestic violence was brought into public attention in a Central-Eastern European country that, for political-historical reasons, has traditionally been hostile to feminism, and also delineating an alternative trajectory for issue-formation and -development, one that was characteristically different from how the domestic violence originally emerged into public attention in Anglo-American societies in the 1970s.

KEYWORDS:

• Central-Eastern Europe
• discursive change
• domestic violence
• Hungary
• news media
• post-socialism

Acknowledgement

I thank the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).