Representation of gender violence in appeal proceedings in Spain

Abstract

Violence against women is a gruesome problem in our society. In 2021 alone, there were around 170,000 complaints of gender-based violence in Spain, and this number has been steadily increasing since 2009, when the first data was collected. Complaints of gender-based violence in Spain are handled and decided by exclusive, specialised or compatible courts; if convicted, the perpetrators can then appeal to higher courts. Given the performative nature of language (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969), it is of the utmost importance to analyse the language used in court by judges and lawyers to refer to violence against women, as this influences the mainstream social perception by facilitating a construal of gender violence. The ways in which language and violence are intertwined have long been studied from various perspectives (Derrida, 2001; Fairclough, 1989; Foucault, 1980). Other authors have explored how language can inflict (and therefore provoke) violence in various forms (van Dijk, 1995; Silva, 2017a, 2017b). In this paper, we examine the representation of gender-based violence in legal language in Spain. We address the language used to refer to violence in the texts analysed; the portrayal in court judgements of participants in acts of gender-based violence; and the resulting social representation of violence, victims and aggressors. We also examine the representation of women from a constructionist perspective (Butler, 1992; 1997; 2004), using corpus pragmatics (Romero-Trillo, 2008) to analyse lexical items and expressions in 20 court judgments in the context of gender-based violence. The results indicate some bias in the representation of violence, aggressors and victims in court judgments.