Abstract
The digital sphere has become a space in which misogyny-laden discourses are constantly presented. In fact, in Mexico persists a rape culture that justifies violent acts against women and blames the victims of the crimes through social opinions. The present study proposed an approach based on the Theory of Social Representations. In this sense, this study aimed to analyze the discourses that emerge in the digital sphere when users give their opinion on five types of crimes against women: femicide, rape, enforced disappearance, abuse, and sexual harassment. The results revealed that there are four types of discourse (representations) framed within rape culture: disbelief of rape, blaming the victim, revictimization, and disempowering women. It is concluded that Mexican society maintains a representation that stereotypes and devalues the image of women, which allows us to understand the aggressions that women suffer in their daily lives.
Introduction
In recent years, social networks have become an arena where online gender-based violence has proliferated (Dimond et al., 2011; Suzor et al., 2019). Given this, academia has carried out a wide variety of research based on social networks that have highlighted various forms of violence suffered by women, which are rooted in patriarchy and sexism (Douglas et al., 2019; Dragiewicz et al., 2018; Idoiaga et al., 2020; Scott, 2008; Varela, 2008). Most of the researched forms of violence against women in both traditional mass media and social media are related to crimes of femicide (Gillespie et al., 2013; Jeffries, 2013; Mandolini, 2017; Tiscareño-García & Miranda-Villanueva, 2020), sexual assault (Layman, 2020; Schwark, 2017; Wellman et al., 2017), sexual harassment (Easteal et al., 2015; Waterhouse-Watson, 2009), or rape (Belair-Gagnon et al., 2014; Harp et al., 2018; Horvath & Brown, 2009).
All these investigations conclude that neither the crimes themselves nor their media coverage can be understood if they are not framed within the notion of a rape culture (Idoiaga et al., 2019; Johnson & Johnson, 2021; Keller et al., 2018; Mendes et al., 2018; Phipps et al., 2018; Stubbs-Richardson et al., 2018). In fact, several studies have revealed two phenomena that promote and justify the violent acts suffered by women in the discourses of the digital sphere (Horeck, 2014; Mendes et al., 2018): victim-blaming (Gravelin et al., 2019; Pinciotti & Orcutt, 2017; Stubbs-Richardson et al., 2018) and revictimization (Anastasio & Costa, 2009; Norris et al., 2018; Nwabueze & Oduah, 2014; Relyea & Ullman, 2017).
In a context such as Mexico, where the culture, through gender stereotypes (Scott, 2008; Tarrés, 2013), promotes discourses that objectify the image of women, analyzing the social thinking framed within rape culture in social networks becomes of utmost importance (Treviño, 2019). In modern societies, the influence of digital media on the opinions and discourses constructed by individuals is undeniable (Zaleski et al., 2016). For this reason, analyzing the social representations of violence against women in the digital sphere will allow us to identify the ideas, beliefs, and ideologies that groups have about the image of women within the framework of the culture of violence and from the perspective of Mexican society (Zaleski et al., 2016; Idoiaga et al., 2019; Valencia et al., 2013).
The Mexican Context
The visibility of violence against women in Mexico can be attributed to two specific factors: first, to the recent empowerment of feminist groups through marches such as the 8M (Zumeta et al., 2020). The second is the high rates of crime that women suffer, which has increased significantly (Secretaria de Seguridad y Protección Ciudadana [SSPC], 2021). According to the National Survey on Dynamics of Household Relationships, in its last three applications, violence against women prevailed and remained constant. Indeed, in 2006 it was found that 67% of women suffered some type of violence, that is, at least one incident of violence of any kind during their lifetime (emotional, physical, sexual harassment, or economic-marital). In 2011, 62.8% of women reported having suffered this type of violence and in 2016, 66.1% of women said they were victims of it (Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía [INEGI], 2016).
Moreover, the situation could be even more serious, as recent studies have shown that many female victims do not usually report the crime to the police (Wood et al., 2021). In the case of Mexico, and the victims of violence previously mentioned, it was found that more than 88.4% of the victims that suffered some type of violence did not report these crimes. The reasons for this lack of reporting can be linked to a rape culture in which the victims considered that what happened to them was something unimportant (49.3%), fear of consequences or threats (19.8%), shame (17.3%), and even because they thought that no one (authorities or family members) would believe that they had suffered from such aggression (9.7%) (INEGI, 2016).
It is also worth noting that in Mexico, certain types of crimes, such as femicides or sexual assaults have increased in recent years. According to data from the SSPC (2021), femicide rates have continually been increasing. In 2015, a total of 411 women were killed, increasing to 605 in the year 2016, 742 in 2017, and in 2018 a total of 893 deaths were reported, with this last year showing the highest rate of femicide to date (98 femicides in 1 month). However, it should be noted that in the years 2019 and 2020, there was a new upturn, with 946 femicides. The types of violence mentioned so far—and their prevalence—reflect statistically the seriousness of the violence that women suffer in their daily lives. Furthermore, in cultural contexts such as the one in this study, where the image of women is constructed and traversed in terms of sexism, these data allow us to hypothesize to what extent this image is loaded with certain beliefs, roles, stereotypes, and norms. In fact, this cultural context also generates discourses and practices (for example, roles in couple relationships) that legitimize violence against women (Arteaga & Valdés, 2010; Moreno et al., 2016). Therefore, it is important to identify the discourses that society conveys about the violent acts that women experience in their daily lives, since such narratives are usually framed within rape culture (Inchaustegui, 2014).
Sex Crimes in Rape Culture
Rape culture has been defined as a belief system that is constructed and normalized within society and one that justifies and sustains sexual violence (Edwards et al., 2011; Maxwell & Scott, 2014; Layman, 2020). That is, rape culture legitimizes cultural beliefs supporting male violence against women, “including the idea that this violence is a fact of life, that there is an association between violence and sexuality, that men are active while women are passive, and that men have a right to sexual intercourse” (Phipps et al., 2018, p. 1). Thus, when the media describe news about sexual abuse or rape, by, for example, describing the crime in terms of a consensual sexual relationship rather than pointing it out or denouncing it, the crime becomes justified (Ehrlich, 2001). Indeed, language creates referents of rape culture for people since it internalizes and consolidates words and ideas, images and concepts, and observations and interpretations, fulfilling at the same time its communicative function. After all, the language and discourses used in rape culture will construct the social reality regarding this problem (Chatterjee, 2019; Stubbs-Richardson et al., 2018).
Victim blaming is also an important component of rape culture since it perpetuates the power structure supporting the accused rather than the abused (Maas et al., 2018). Victim-blaming frames victims as responsible for being raped due to several factors: the victim’s attractiveness, dress, alcohol intake, being in an unsafe area, or going out at night (Durham, 2013; Moody-Ramirez et al., 2015). In fact, victim-blaming implies that the victim “should have known that she was engaging in risky behaviors” (Moody-Ramirez et al., 2015, p. 4). All these factors impact decisions made by both victims and criminal justice actors handling sexual assault cases (Sacks et al., 2018) and usually serve to generate disbelief towards the victims along with a low rapist conviction rate (Phipps et al., 2018). Concerning victim-blaming in the digital sphere, it has also been found that social media can be understood as a growing space for engagement, discussion, and conflict between those who support victims and those who engage in victim-blaming and the promotion of rape culture (Stubbs-Richardson et al., 2018; Zaleski et al., 2016).
Victim blaming is also a key factor in revictimization. When the media blame the victim for the crime they have suffered, this can generate psychological distress for her, such as post-traumatic stress disorder or self-blame, revictimizing her once again (Franiuk et al., 2008; Nwabueze & Oduah, 2014; Relyea & Ullman, 2017). Many raped women, for example, report feeling a sense of revictimization after their public self-disclosure due to the resulting personal threats and offensive social reactions, which adversely affects their well-being and daily functioning (Gueta et al., 2020). Revictimization is a process that emerges mainly in the case of sexual crimes and is less common in other types of crimes such as kidnapping or murder (Anastasio & Costa, 2004).
Social Representations as a Framework for Understanding Social Thinking about Rape Culture
From the conception of rape culture and revictimization, authors such as Bohner et al. (2009) and Schwark (2017) have highlighted that in social thinking there are cultural beliefs framed within rape culture that justify sexual crimes. Although this social thinking has been defined as the source of individuals' everyday knowledge (Cerrato & Palmonari, 2007), social psychology states that it is highly influenced by mass communication (Ben-Asher, 2003; Idoiaga et al., 2020). Therefore, to understand such thinking, it is crucial to analyze collective thinking in social networks. For this purpose, Social Representations Theory (SRT) is one of the theoretical frameworks of reference (Moscovici & Duveen, 2000).
According to SRT, communication is a prerequisite for social and individual thoughts (Wagner et al., 2011). This theory argues that in the digital sphere, the constructs, beliefs, valuations, discourses, and cultural burdens of people’s opinions are replicated (Farah, 2011; Höijer, 2011). As the discourse of social networks offers us a naturalistic setting for social thinking (Stubbs-Richardson et al., 2018), such networks have frequently been used for the analysis of Social Representations (SRs) (Idoiaga et al., 2019, 2020; de Rosa et al., 2021; Zamperini et al., 2012). From this research, we conclude that social networks are becoming a field of special interest for analyzing contemporary changes. In particular, some of these studies have analyzed both the evolution of the feminist movement (Idoiaga et al., 2021) and in other cases, violence against women (Idoiaga et al., 2019, 2020) pointing out that social networks are creating counter-movements that can also be extrapolated to civil society, both in support of victims and victim-blaming. It is therefore necessary to be very attentive to these counter-movements to know at what point violence against women is legitimized in each society.
Moreover, SRT also points out that social representations are always related to a social or cultural situation or to symbolic objects (Lo Monaco & Guimelli, 2011). This means that depending on the object of study, different discourses and opinions will emerge (Farah, 2011; Guimelli & Rouquette, 2004; Reyes-Sosa et al., 2015). Therefore, in this study, different sexual crimes would be expected to create diverse representations (femicide, rape, enforced disappearance, abuse, and sexual harassment).
Research Objectives
The main objective of this study was to analyze the discourse on Facebook about crimes based on violence against women in Mexico to understand how these crimes are dealt with through social media debate. We have attempted to identify the main elements that could explain how people symbolically construct and engage with violence against women in general, and with femicide, rape, sexual abuse, sexual harassment, and enforced disappearance in particular. Concretely these violent acts were conceptualized as follows. Femicide is the misogynistic killing of women by men out of hatred, contempt, pleasure, or a sense of ownership over women. It occurs largely in societies characterized by male dominance and female subordination (Corradi et al., 2016; Radford & Russell, 1992). Rape can be defined as a forced sexual assault that occurs without the consent of the victim. Rape is different from sexual abuse as it has as its main feature the exercise of violence and use of force (Diehl et al., 2020; García-Piña et al., 2013; Rebeiz & Harb, 2010). Enforced disappearance refers to the disappearance of persons who disappear from their community when state agents (with or without the consent of the state) stop them on the street or in their home and then refuse or refuse to tell where the victim is. In some cases, the disappearance is carried out by non-state actors or armed groups (Amnesty International, 2020). Sexual abuse occurs when a person is subjected by another person to sexual practices to which he or she never consented. These practices are characterized by sexual touching or fondling, requests for sexual activities, exhibitionism, or exposure. In addition, it should be noted that sexual abuse usually does not involve physical force (García-Piña et al., 2013). Finally, sexual harassment refers to the fact that a person in a position of power (high status) sexually harasses a subordinate (a person of lower status) (Mohipp & Senn, 2008). We expect to find that these crimes are framed within a culture of rape, revictimization, and victim-blaming. However, we also expect that each typology of crime will evoke a specific response since their social representations will vary according to how the public deals with them.
Design
Data Collection
The digital version of the newspaper El Debate 1 published on the social network Facebook was used to collect the data. El Debate is among the newspapers with the largest presence in Mexico, with 4.8 million followers. It has the fourth-highest level of user interaction with publications, either through comments, sharing, or reactions (González, 2018). The types of crimes against women that have been analyzed were the following: femicide, rape, enforced disappearance (also known as forced disappearance, see Blanco et al., 2020), sexual abuse, and sexual harassment. We decided to analyze the 2018 year for two reasons. First, there was an increase in these crimes during the period of 2017–2020, these were the crimes with the highest increase in prevalence in society and were also the crimes that had the highest presence in the media (SSPC, 2021). The second was that in 2018 the issue of violence against women was positioned and made visible as an urgent problem. Thus, in a large part of the Mexican territory, a policy called Gender Violence Alerts Against Women was established, a mechanism aimed at reducing violence against women (Comisión Nacional para Prevenir y Erradicar la Violencia Contra las Mujeres [CONAVIM], 2021).
News and type of crime.
The total number of comments analyzed in this study was 1709 (total number of comments available in the news). For each type of crime, the number of analyzed comments was as follows: femicide 453, rape 459, enforced disappearance 224, sexual abuse 223, and sexual harassment 350.
Data Analysis
Data analysis was conducted using the IRaMuTeQ 7 software (R Interface for Multidimensional Analysis of Texts and Questionnaires). This free software allows multidimensional analysis of texts of a different nature, for example, interviews or questionnaires with open-ended questions. With IRaMuTeQ 7, discursive patterns (lexical worlds) can be found because, in its analyses, it makes comparisons between column-profiles and row-profiles (Ratinaud & Déjean, 2009). IRaMuTeQ 7, before launching the analysis, lemmatizes the words to transform them to their canonical form or their root (Carneiro et al., 2017). The chi-square statistic is used to obtain the distance indices that show the degree of proximity or disparity between the categories constructed (Garnier & Guérin-Pace, 2010). In this study, the IRaMuTeQ 7 software was used for two different types of analysis: the Reinert method and lexical similarity analysis.
The Reinert method using IRaMuTeQ 7 software for lexical analysis (Reinert, 1983, 1990) was employed to analyze the text corpus. Researchers that have used the Reinert method in the field of social representations (Kalampalikis, 2005; Klein & Licata, 2003; Lahlou, 1996, 2011) and social networks (Idoiaga et al., 2019, 2020) have empirically demonstrated the capacity of this method to analyze these through symmetries created between the lexical world and the shared representations.
Using this method, which follows a descending hierarchical analysis format, the analyst obtains a series of classes and statistical cues in the form of specific words and typical text segments (see Idoiaga et al., 2020). Specifically, the software identifies the words and text segments with the highest Chi-square values (see Vizeu & Bousfield, 2009), that is, those words and text segments that best identify each class or idea that the participants have repeatedly mentioned. The text segments included in the results of this study are the most characteristic segments of each class.
Once these lexical universes were identified, they are associated with passive variables (independent variables). In the present case, the independent variables were the types of crimes: (1) femicide, (2) rape, (3) enforced disappearance, (4) sexual abuse, and (5) sexual harassment.
To create the labels or titles of each class, the process suggested by Illia et al. (2014) was followed, which consists of the following steps: (1) distance class: in a first step, it is observed that the words that appear in classes are significantly different; (2) List of significant words: in this second step, attention should be paid at the chi-square level to identify the most significant words. In that process, two of the researchers independently named each class based on the words and associated text segments. Finally, to avoid bias in the creation of variable labels, an expert judge was used, that is, a third researcher created a final label that all three researchers approved.
IRaMuTeQ 7 also conducted a lexical similarity analysis. This type of analysis looks at the whole corpus, regardless of whether the answers were from one participant (subject) or another. It considers that the more times two elements were treated the same way, the closer they will be in representational structure to the object to which they refer (Molina-Neira, 2017). To do this, it identifies the co-occurrences between words according to their connections in the text, helping to identify the structure of the content of the textual corpus due to its visualization in graphic form, which illustrates the content of the social representation of the object studied and its internal organization, common parts, and specificities (Marchand & Ratinaud, 2012). Similarity analysis presents a summary of the structure contained in a tree-shaped graph representing the maximum forms and related forms, where the nodes are the forms and the lexical communities are shown (Ormeño, 2017). Finally, it should be clarified that all the data of this research were collected in Spanish, and the analyses were carried out in that language. Once all the analyses were completed, the words, text, and quotations extracted were translated by a professional translator to be published in English.
Results
First, to analyze the main discourses produced by Facebook users about rape culture and revictimization by analyzing sexual abuse, sexual harassment, rape, femicide, and enforced disappearance, the response body was analyzed using the IRaMuTeQ 7 software. The full corpus contained 42,831 words, of which 5468 were unique.
Reinert Method Analysis Section
The Reinert method’s descending hierarchical analysis divided the corpus into 696 segments and four classes. The results of this analysis can be observed in Figure 1. The hierarchical clustering dendrogram of the free association with the most frequent words and the words with the greatest association χ2 (1), p < .001.
The first class accounted for 26.7% of the total content and was labeled “Disbelief of rape.” The central theme of this class focuses on the disbelief of violence, that is, it is emphasized that the victim accepted the relationship (consensual sex) for the sake of gaining a benefit. This justifies the crime that she has suffered. Within this class, two discourses can be identified that allow us to understand and characterize how sexual crimes are justified. In addition, these discourses are characteristic of the comments collected in social networks. Thus, there is a discourse that questions the credibility of the complaint since it was not made at the time the crime was committed. The most significant words in this class are fame (χ2 = 77.6), moment (χ2 = 77.32), denounce (χ2 = 47.52), and after (χ2 = 67.49). The following are the most significant segments of this class (those with the highest chi-square): “They want to be protagonists, they should have denounced at the time, now it turns out that the raped women are going to come to light because they did not denounce in time.” On the other hand, another discourse was presented that also refers to the credibility of the complaint. However, in the latter, credibility is related to a status condition, that is, the victim is not believed because it is considered that by having a status within the social structure, she does not report the crime suffered. The most significant words in these discourses are fame (χ2 = 77.6), name (χ2 = 73.28), and famous (χ2 = 61.92). The following are the most significant segments of this class (those with the highest chi-square): “I support the women who have really lived that terrible experience, but you cannot defend these girls who do anything to achieve fame; “It is a cliché about all the raped celebrities. When they had sex, it was not convenient for them to talk and now they do. These celebrities put fame first, even above their dignity and then when they have achieved success, they denounce something from years ago.” This class was mainly mentioned in the news about rape (p = .001) and sexual harassment (p = .001).
The second class, named “Blaming the victim” accounted for 24.4% of the content. In this class, the discourse focuses on highlighting gender stereotypes and blaming the victim who has suffered the crime. More specifically, two discourses have been identified in this class that blames the group of women because certain behaviors and practices in their daily lives could lead them to become victims of a sexual crime. One discourse is characterized by and focuses on issues of respect: respect (χ2 = 79.65), regard (χ2 = 73.06), and right (χ2 = 55.27). The following exemplifies the above “Well, if they want respect from men, they should start to respect themselves, because the way they dress, they look more like sex workers, so they can't be respected.” Another discourse is characterized by referring to the fact that the type of clothing women wear exposes them to and may encourage them to suffer a crime. The following are the most significant words of this type of discourse: dress (χ2 = 65.19) and naked (χ2 = 55.27). In this regard, these are the most significant quotations of this class: “At home you can walk around naked, but not at work, unless it is a gym, men walk around, they bring the fire between their legs and women dressed like that, so women should not complain, or act offended.” This class was significantly associated with sexual harassment (p = .001).
The third class, labeled “Revictimization” accounted for 26.7% of the content. This class of discourse refers to the fact that a person’s actions and decisions in their daily life have consequences and are their responsibility. In this case, this discourse blames women for the fact that although they are aware of the reality of their country (high levels of danger), they expose themselves to risky situations.
As in the previous classes, two types of discourse and words can be found in this fourth class that allows us to understand revictimization. On the one hand, there is a discourse that points out that even though it is well known (for example, in the media) about the high levels of violence and insecurity, women expose themselves to these situations and therefore become victims. The most significant words and discourse of this type of affirmation are as follows: expose (χ2 =46.29) or know (χ2 = 60.02) and ignore (χ2 =42.62). The following are the most significant discourses of the users in this class: “So many things you see on TV or with the neighbors themselves, I don't know, nothing is hidden now, they have been warned a lot about these things that are happening, and they don't understand, stupid people, well I'm sorry, but she was exposed.” Another discourse refers to revictimizing the victim herself since she exposes herself to certain risk situations due to her own decisions. The words that characterize this cluster are trust (χ2 =72.89), need (χ2 = 65.38), and people (χ2 =52.49). The following are the most significant discourses of the users in this class: “She gave her own body to her assailant. We all know how many tragedies are committed and happen. I do not understand why girls continue to trust men if we know what happens in Mexico with so much corruption, kidnappings and murder”; “She goes with him even if she does not know him, what a crazy woman, why expose yourself, you have to have so much malice please.” This class was associated with rape (p = .001) and sexual abuse (p = .001).
Finally, the fourth class was named “Disempowering women” and was the class with the greatest weight, accounting for 29.3% of the content. In this representation, the discourses of the users focus on justifying the violent act of disempowering women by portraying them as beings who cannot protect themselves and need constant supervision. In this class we found a specific discourse that refers to the fact that women are more vulnerable and therefore more likely to become victims of violence. The most significant words that confirm the previous discourse are father (χ2 = 255.66), age (χ2 =133.45), going out (χ2 = 107.26), son (χ2 = 94.9), child (χ2 = 83.62), night (χ2 = 71.15), and alone (χ2 = 65.42). The following are the most characteristic text segments of this class: “They are more vulnerable, easy prey for rape and in the worst case of murder, simply at that age they are still naive, and being minors they should always be supervised by parents”; “She should simply not be given permission to go out, she was a child, where is the authority of the parents knowing how dangerous it is, what a bad education”; “It is a great risk for young girls to go out nowadays, this situation is very difficult, poor girls, I hope the government finds them, which I don't believe it will.” This class was associated with femicide (p = .001) and enforced disappearance (p = .001).
Lexical Similarity Analysis Section
Second, to generate an image that would reflect the co-occurrences between all the words in the corpus beyond their division into classes, a lexical similarity analysis was performed. The idea was to analyze how the corpus words were interconnected on a common plane and how they were grouped according to the independent variables, which are represented by colors (see Figure 2). Results of the lexical similarity analysis.
The similarity analysis reveals that the corpus is divided around five nuclei. The nucleus linked to sexual abuse is represented in red and is linked to the words: walk, street, nude, naked, dress, look, regard, respect, see, and night. So sexual abuse is associated with a crime that might be suffered by women who walk alone in the streets, something that has been previously pointed by the scientific literature (Durham, 2013; Moody-Ramirez et al., 2015). Enforced disappearance, represented in green, was particularly linked to the families of missing women with words such as dad, son, father, or children. Femicide, represented in blue, was represented by two nuclei. The first spoke about a network of people (network, know, people, person, need) and the other about the fact that strangers cannot be trusted (stranger, trust, many, expose, thing) (Gillespie et al., 2013; Jeffries, 2013; Mandolini, 2017).
Rape was depicted in purple, and the notion of victim was re-emphasized with words such as age, night, go out, leave, or alone (Belair-Gagnon et al., 2014; Harp et al., 2018). Finally, sexual harassment was represented in yellow and was the nucleus with the most words, creating three branches. The first branch mentioned the moment of the report (report, moment, now), the second referred to speaking out and giving the name of the aggressor (speak, name) and the third implies that fame is sought, and this is the price to pay (famous, fame, price, pay, after) (Easteal et al., 2015; Waterhouse-Watson, 2009).
Discussion
The main purpose of this study was to analyze the ideas and opinions that exist in the digital sphere about criminal acts against women such as sexual harassment, rape, sexual abuse, femicides, and enforced disappearances through the perspective of rape culture, revictimization, and the theory of social representations (Farah, 2011; Höijer, 2011; Maxwell & Scott, 2014; Layman, 2020; Sammut et al., 2015). The social representation perspective implies that, in modern societies, images and discourses are constantly changing and that such change is due to social communication (Wagner et al., 2011). However, based on the results of this study, the beliefs and social constructions that exist in Mexican society (culture) about violence against women are still rooted in a highly sexist culture (Treviño, 2019). In Mexican society, stereotypes lay bare the relationship between gender and power in society (Barragan et al., 2017; García et al., 2017). In Mexico in particular, gender stereotypes continue to be closely associated with the superiority of men and the submission of women (Stobbe, 2005; Arciniega et al., 2008). Thus, women are assigned a lower status or importance compared with men, favoring machismo and sexism, attributing different characteristics to the two sexes (Mendoza & Gonzales, 2014; Sterling, 2018). The discourse that predominates in the opinions of the newspaper El Debate’s Facebook page is one of aggression against women who have been victims, which is a clear way of revictimizing them (Relyea & Ullman, 2017). In this sense, as evidenced by the results of this research, there is well-established social thinking rooted in a rape culture that justifies and supports victim-blaming (Keller et al., 2018; Scott, 2008; Varela, 2008).
SRs are understood as multifaceted concepts constructed and reconstructed based on communication and social interactions (Moscovici, 2002). However, these representations are always anchored to an object of representation, that is, SRs, and their differences emerge based on an object of social interest (Moscovici & Duveen, 2000; Lo Monaco & Guimelli, 2011). In our case, it has been found that there is a consensus on the discourses of users related to violence framed within rape culture. Depending on the types of crimes, different representations have emerged. On the one hand, around the crimes of rape, sexual abuse, and sexual harassment, users create an aggressive discourse where victim-blaming and victim-revictimization is the main characteristic (Layman, 2020; Schwark, 2017; Easteal et al., 2015; Gravelin et al., 2019; Pinciotti & Orcutt, 2017; Stubbs-Richardson et al., 2018). This discourse postulates several of the key ideas of rape culture (Johnson & Johnson, 2021; Keller et al., 2018; Mendes et al., 2019; Phipps et al., 2018; Stubbs-Richardson et al., 2018) and is concerned with devaluing the image of women. For example, in the analyzed discourses, it is found that women are categorized through stereotypes of weakness and vulnerability (Schwark, 2017). In fact, blaming (Franiuk et al., 2008; Zaleski et al., 2016) and disbelief (Bohner et al., 2009) of sexual abuse or harassment are associated with women’s behavior, for example, the victim’s attractiveness, dress, or alcohol intake (Layman, 2020; Schwark, 2017). Thus, the discourses shown by the users in relation to revictimization are interesting. The latter is oriented towards stereotyping the image of women by pointing out that women were victims of crime due to being in unsafe places or walking alone at certain hours (Durham, 2013; Moody-Ramirez et al., 2015, Layman, 2020; Nwabueze & Oduah, 2014).
In the case of femicide and forced disappearance, crimes generally considered more serious or that have no way back, there is less of this discourse of blaming with direct aggression, but what instead emerges is a much more perverse discourse where female victims are represented as people who could disappear or be killed because they could not protect themselves (Akhmedshina, 2020; Jeffries, 2013; Mandolini, 2017; Tiscareño-García & Miranda-Villanueva, 2020). In this discourse, women are completely disempowered, and they are represented as being at the mercy of the protection of men (McMahon & Kahn, 2018). That is to say, it seems that explicitly blaming the victim—whether dead or missing—with an aggressive discourse is not viewed in a positive light. Nonetheless, this does not create an empathizing discourse (Anastasio & Costa, 2004) but rather one that de-legitimizes women as people.
From the analysis of digital media discourses, it is interesting to find that in societies such as Mexico, ideas, beliefs, and stereotypes about the image of women are maintained (Keller et al., 2018); although, as previously noted, social representations are characterized by constant change (Wagner et al., 2011). However, objects are anchored in culture and permeated by an ideological vision, and such objects are more static and largely unchangeable, that is, they are hegemonic representations (Cerrato & Palmonari, 2007). All group members share hegemonic representations (society), which are highly structured and are burdened by a historical-hegemonic vision (Ben-Asher, 2003; Lo Monaco & Guimelli, 2011).
Indeed, such hegemonic representations dictate and determine the ideas, practices, and behaviors that a society displays regarding a subject (Farah, 2011; Höijer, 2011). For this reason, as our results show, the image of women is an object that has changed little in Mexican society (Tiscareño-García & Miranda-Villanueva, 2020). Thus, at least in this study, it appears that the opinions shown by users within the digital sphere are permeated by and rooted in patriarchal and sexist practices that are manifest in discourses based on rape culture (Douglas et al., 2019; Dragiewicz et al., 2018; Idoiaga et al., 2020; Scott, 2008; Varela, 2008). The main consequence of rape culture is the justification of criminal acts such as those of a sexual nature, which perpetuate the victim-blaming and revictimization beliefs, discourses, and opinions found in the present study (Layman, 2020; Suárez & Gadalla, 2010).
In addition, these results reflect the influence and impact of culture in two ways. The first refers to the maintenance of discourses that justify, re-victimize, and blame women who have been victims of violence (Zaleski et al., 2016). The second concerns the impact of culture through discourses in the legitimization of violence against women. Specifically, the analysis of contexts such as the one in this study allows us to evidence and hypothesize that the crimes analyzed here are unlikely to decline in a short period of time. As long as the image of women is adjacent to the rape culture and the sexual crimes that women experience in their daily lives, these practices will be legitimized and justified, which is why it is essential to monitor the discourses that are generated and modified within rape culture in social networks, as this research has attempted to do (Arteaga & Valdés, 2010).
To tackle this legitimization of violence against women, it is necessary to act urgently on the discourses produced on social networks. For this reason, immediate action by the Mexican government in particular, as well as by international stakeholders in general, would be key, since despite the existence of laws (for example, the law on women’s access to a life free of violence) that regulate the use of images and information where violent acts against women are presented, there are no sanctions for such media. Therefore, it is also important to raise awareness among society about the perpetuation of rape myths and the type of images that are projected in digital media, which continue to reproduce discourses that revictimize and blame the woman victim of a criminal act. Moreover, several studies have shown the possibilities of the feminist digital discourse and its potential for transforming individual opinions into effective strategies for action (Sánchez-Duarte & Fernández-Romero, 2017). In fact, several authors have pointed out that the feminist contents that work best on the Internet are those that are written in the first person and that politicize daily experiences with which anyone can identify (Idoiaga et al., 2021; Keller et al., 2018).
A limitation of this work is that our findings are not representative of society as a whole, but only of certain Facebook users. It is also important to consider that although feminist users have an increasing presence in social networks, there are also growing online groups of misogynists that legitimize violence against women in their posts (Idoiaga et al., 2021). In the same vein, the study sample also has certain limitations that should be highlighted. Specifically, we limited our study to the news with the most comments in 2018, and it might therefore be worthwhile to extend the search to other years to examine if the treatment of the news has evolved over time.
In this regard, it would be interesting to conduct a longitudinal study that allows us to show whether, in recent years, the image of women that has been established in Mexican society has undergone any changes. The latter is of utmost importance since, in Mexico, the influence of feminist groups has exploded and generated new ways of representing women, while bringing to light the less visible forms of violence such as harassment or sexual abuse. Thus, it is possible to think that the underlying beliefs of rape culture have been impacted by these feminist groups. The image of women is in dissonance; that is, we might have reason to believe that there is an emerging polemic representation that questions the reification of women.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
