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 Introduction feminist discourses had for long been missing. CEE countries including Hungary, having been Soviet satellite states between 1949 and 1989-1990, remained untouched by secondwave feminism until the 1990s (Brier 2019).Regarding Hungary specifically, although the first-wave feminist movement had been present in the country since the 1900s (Szapor 2004), after the Second World War, when the Soviets took control of Hungary as part of their political expansion into the CEE region, the feminist movement was systematically silenced (Pető 1998). In the following decades feminism was proclaimed unnecessary, with the explanation that equality between the sexes would be achieved with the advent of communism (DeSilva 1993). This resulted in domestic violence against women remaining entirely "invisible" and "unheard of" under state socialism, and only sporadically noted in the 1990s (Margit 2002). Even when after the fall of the Berlin Wall women's and gender equality issues, including that of domestic violence, could become subjects of public discussion for the first time since decades, the widespread disdain for feminism-endemic in the entire post-socialist region (Brier 2019)-made it difficult to raise public attention to domestic violence through framing it as a women's issue. This indeed has not occurred, as I hope to illustrate in the next pages, until the early 2010s. Feminist Constructions of Domestic Violence and Their Counter-Constructions in the Mediated Public SphereIn line with feminist understandings of the issue, this study views domestic violence against women as a frequent type of interpersonal and structural violence that is primarily enabled by gendered inequalities, but also intersects with a complex range of other power inequalities like those based on race, ethnicity, class, religion or even age (Crenshaw 1991). Domestic violence is structural in the sense that, despite occurring between individuals, it is rooted in well-established structures of domination and inequalities of power at a broader social level (Galtung 1969). As Boyle (2005, 84-93) no...

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