Abstract
This study seeks to examine the representation of men in rape coverage produced by Thai media. The analysis is theoretically triangulated between Biber et al.’s markers of stance and Mellado’s journalistic role performance. Methodologically, corpus-assisted discourse analysis is adopted. The corpus consists of 167 news articles with a total number of 126,150 words. The period of publication ranges from 2007 to 2022. Findings indicate that male perpetrators are discursively vilified through discourse structures which signify augmented agency to inflict harm upon victims. To illustrate, the lexical item rape is made to occur simultaneously with other material verb processes which intensify an act of violence such as bludgeon and kill. In contrast, the agency of male victims is downplayed. This is evidenced in the fact that their voice is expressed through other parties such as witnesses and NGO officers instead of emanating from the victims themselves. Possible ways to humanise the representation are discussed.
Keywords
Introduction
Rape is a social problem which exerts destructive effects on victims and their families (Mgolozeli & Duma, 2019). More importantly, they are not limited to females. That men do suffer from various forms of consequences is well documented. Psychologically, they are left with feelings of shame and loss of self-worth (Purnell, 2019). Behaviourally, they are inclined to commit suicide and other non-suicidal self-injury (Watters & Yalch, 2022). Furthermore, the likelihood of subsequently becoming sex offenders is significantly increased (Drury et al., 2019).
In Thailand, rape incidents reported to the police between 2008 and 2013 were approximately one case every two hours (Sumrit, 2014). It can be construed that the true figure is supposed to be much higher as ‘silent’ victims elect not to report primarily due to embarrassment (Ho, 2019). Besides, it is observed that the proportion of Thai men who are sexually abused is as closely equivalent as that of Thai women (18% vs 23%) (Ho, 2019). Notwithstanding this prevalence, research on the rape issue in Thailand remains deficient (Puchakanit & Rhein, 2022).
The media have strong influence on this social problem. Their representation is a source of power which can raise public awareness (Ahmad et al., 2020). Hence, investigating the media representation would shed light on discursive practices which, if framed on a proper basis, can stimulate discussion and action among the public so that a resolution to the problem can possibly be realised.
Extant literature which has examined such representation mainly revolves around female victims in various aspects including their reaction to cyber violence (Sarkar & Rajan, 2021), victim-blaming language (Bohmert et al., 2019), the trivialisation of the sexual violence through euphemisms (Aroustamian, 2020) and stigmatising language which supplies unnecessary details of rape (Minwalla et al., 2022). Therefore, this study intends to extend the discussion by investigating the representation of men in rape coverage produced by Thai media.
Men and a Rape Issue from the Perspectives of the Media
Men are represented in the media as either perpetrators or victims of a rape incident. Regarding the perpetrators, Nilsson (2019) elaborates on the four types of perpetrators depicted in Swedish media. First, the lonely perverts are strange and aggressive with uncontrollable desires. They are contingent upon a dark and secluded place where they can skulk and subsequently assault victims. Second, the sex slavery perpetrators occupy a position of power as a result of their profession, class, age or relationship and engage in the imprisonment of victims. Furthermore, restricting their freedom entails perpetrators committing sexually sadistic actions which are intended to cause fear and pain. That, in turn, is observed to render perpetrators sexually aroused (Wojcik & Fisher, 2019). Third, perpetrators are celebrities whom the society can hardly expect to commit rape. In this case, the focus of representation is not on perpetrators but ‘the strong opposition raised against the accuser in favour of the accused’ (Nilsson, 2019, p. 1187). Fourth is ‘the suburb rape’ perpetrators who are characterised as a group of racialised young boys committing gang rape either outdoors or in anonymous accommodation located outside the metropolitan area.
Regarding the portrayal of male victims, one of the central themes is to what extent the media cultivate or counter male rape myths. They refer to commonly held beliefs about male-to-male rape, which are academically shown to be erroneous (Abdullah-Khan, 2008). Some of them include ‘men cannot be raped […] and rape victims are responsible for their rape’ (Ryan, 2019, p. 151). Although some narratives produced by the Western media are found to sustain those myths, a deliberate attempt to dispel them is discernible. For example, the media highlight that all men can be raped irrespective of their sexuality, size, age or background as exemplified in the headline ‘I’m male, 55 and overweight. Why rape me?’ (Abdullah-Khan, 2008, p. 108). Moreover, contrary to popular myth, the media stress that male victims do suffer from the deleterious effects of the incident (Abdullah-Khan, 2008). In fact, some counsellors perceive that male victims have particular traits different from those of female victims (e.g., being goal-driven and socialising in structured settings), thus requiring appropriate knowledge and understanding in healing them (Javaid, 2020).
Unlike that of perpetrators, there seems to be a dearth of studies concerning the typology of male victims portrayed in the media. Rather, a system of classification is derived from other sources such as interviews with victims. For instance, in a South African context, victims belong to six types of rape: (a) acquaintance rape, (b) stranger rape, (c) gang rape, (d) homophobic rape, (e) prison rape and (f) armed rape (Mgolozeli & Duma, 2019).
Theoretical Frameworks
The media representation of a particular issue usually involves employing linguistic structures to ‘frame the meaning of the information, very often in a subtle manner’ (O’Keeffe & Breen, 2007, p. 218). To unravel those structures, this study utilises Biber et al.’s (1999) markers of stance. It has been used to investigate child abuse cases portrayed in an Irish newspaper (O’Keeffe & Breen, 2007). This study extends its explanatory power by re-contextualising it to examine how male perpetrators and victims of rape are depicted in Thai media. Encapsulated in O’Keeffe and Breen (2007), it is divided into the following categories: (a) lexical markers of stance (e.g., pervert padres) (b) stance adverbials (e.g., unfortunately) (c) stance complement clauses (e.g., there can be little doubt that) (d) modals and semi-modals (e.g., this should not be allowed to happen) (e) stance noun + prepositional phrase (e.g., a litany of stomach-curdling abuse) (f) pre-modifying stance adverbs (e.g., this is an extremely serious allegation) and (g) stance reporting structures (tears flowed down the cheeks of grown men when they described the vile treatment).
After the identification of the linguistic structures, a question arises as to how they discursively reflect the representation of men. At this juncture, a communication framework known as the journalistic role performance (Mellado, 2015) comes into play. It refers to practices which journalists adopt in order to perform their professional duties on a legitimate and meaningful basis (Hanitzsch, 2007). It is divided into the following dimensions as displayed in Table 1. Arguably, the perpetrators and the victims are represented via certain linguistic structures which is emblematic of certain journalistic roles.
Six Dimensions of the Journalistic Role Performance.
This framework has been employed to analyse the roles of journalists in Swedish and Danish media regarding the coverage of the #MeToo movement which is a widespread phenomenon against sexual harassment, rape culture and misogyny (Møller Hartley, & Askanius, 2021). Evidently, such a phenomenon particularly targets at worldwide female victims. The current study extends its application by re-contextualising it to examine the journalistic roles expressed in the media coverage regarding men and a rape issue in Thailand.
Methodology
While previous studies are primarily contingent upon quantitative methods such as content analysis (e.g., O’Boyle & Li, 2019), the current study investigates the issue of men in rape coverage from a different angle by employing corpus-assisted discourse analysis (CADA) (Subtirelu & Baker, 2018). Instead of cherry-picking a text largely based on intuition or pre-existing assumption, qualitative discourse analysis is facilitated by statistically significant data derived from the computation of corpus software. In this study, CADA was divided into the following steps.
Step 1: Corpus collection
Sexual violence, including rape, has been explored in a range of media such as films (Mallam, 2019), television (Hogan, 2022) and social media platforms (Suk et al., 2023). The present study contributes to the existing literature by investigating news coverage produced by media outlets in an Eastern context. Initially, the corpus consisted of the coverage retrieved from a search engine Google (Minwalla et al., 2022). Based on the focus of the study, the search terms were rape, men, male and Thailand. Despite the presence of those terms, not all the results matched with what the current study had sought to investigate. Therefore, the following three criteria were established to ensure data relevance: (a) the media are based in Thailand. This could be verified in the About Us section; (b) the content pertains to rape incidents which are associated with men and (c) the language of publication is English.
Altogether, the coverage which satisfied the above criteria, as detailed in Table 2, was compiled and converted into a machine-readable format (.txt). It was statistically processed by AntConc 3.5.9 (Anthony, 2020). The period of publication was between 2007 and 2022.
Overview of the Corpus.
Step 2: Word-level investigation
Collocation analysis is one of the common analytical approaches of corpus linguistics, which is applicable to discourse analysis (Brookes & McEnery, 2020). In this study, a point of departure was the identification of significant collocates. The search words in AntConc were man and men. Regarding statistical measures, mutual information (MI) and T-score were employed. The former emphasises on collocational strength (Baker, 2008) while the latter demonstrates that the collocational relationship is not random (Matytcina & Grigoryanova, 2022). The cut-off scores for the MI and T-score were 3.00 and 2.00, respectively (Bleich et al., 2021; Tang, 2021). The span was established at −5 to +5 (Pei et al., 2022).
Step 3: Phrase- and sentence-level investigation
The analysis of each significant collocate was expanded through the investigation of its concordance lines. They are ‘a list of all of the occurrences of a particular search term in a corpus, presented within the context that they occur; usually a few words to the left and right of the search term’ (Baker, 2008, p. 71). Guided by Biber et al. (1999), the researcher observed and compiled emerging lexico-grammatical patterns from those lines.
Step 4: Paragraph-level investigation
The patterns captured in the previous step were examined in detail through the investigation of the co-text. To avoid random selection, the chunks of the co-text primarily comprised the significant collocates. Guided by Mellado (2015), the researcher attempted to account for each pattern of representation from the perspectives of the journalistic role performance.
Results and Discussion
Significant Collocates
The significant collocates are displayed in Table 3. In the analysis of this section, they are highlighted in italics.
Significant Collocates of MEN and MAN at a −5 to +5 Span.
Several observations can be made about these significant collocates. First, certain of them could co-occur in a form of a proper noun. For example, Mr Jaded Chouwilai is the director of the Women and Men Progressive Movement Foundation. Second, rape may be connected with wider social contexts in Thailand including Buddhism (as hinted in monks) and patriarchy. Lastly, what appears missing is the collocates pertaining to men who suffer from being raped such as victim or survivor. Meanwhile, it may be argued that the collocates which explicitly represent men as actors, such as perpetrators or rapists, are also non-existent. However, in the latter case, other collocates including woman and girl seem to imply that men are initiators.
Qualitative Analysis
Lexical Markers of Stance: ‘year’ and ‘old’
The first emerging pattern pertains to the significant collocates year and old. Hence, it can be classified into the category of lexical markers of stance (Biber et al., 1999). The concordance lines are displayed in Table 4.
Sample from Concordance Line of Year and Old.
The lexical items which are associated with men can be divided into two categories. First, the seemingly neutral words depict men in terms of their professions such as model (line 1) and monk (lines 7–9, 13). Common nouns are also utilised as exemplified in man (lines 6, 14) and boy (line 12).
Contrary to the first, the second category reflects lexical items which are explicitly aligned. They are manifested in the words that connote an immoral person such as monster (line 2), sexually abusive behaviour such as rapist (lines 3,5) and killer (line 4) and a person who uses physical force such as attacker (line 11) and assailant (line 15).
Both categories of the lexical items are employed to represent male perpetrators. Closer investigation into the co-text reveals that the explicitly aligned lexical items occur in tandem with the identification of age. Presumably, this is intended to intensify the fact that male perpetrators are older than victims. Such older age could be associated with more agency to inflict harm on victims as evidenced by the use of material verb processes including launch a sexual assault and attempt to rape in Extract (1) and rape a girl in Extract (2).
The body of 23-year-old Inthuron Korhan was found at 11 pm on Christmas Day beside the elevator on the 7th floor of the 10 storey B2 apartment block […] On Monday, a senior officer revealed the woman was attacked by her 41-year-old assailant, named Mr Nathachai Atsamat, after he hid in a cupboard in her bedroom before launching a sexual assault as he attempted to rape Ms Inthuron. Thai Examiner, 29 December 2021.
An alleged rapist, 54, on the run for 19 long years, was finally nabbed on Wednesday. The man […] had raped a girl, 16, in 2002 at a rented room in Bangkok’s Nong Khaem district. The Nation, 15 September 2021.
However, in case of male victims, only the neutral words are discernible. Additionally, no agency seems to be emphasised as exemplified in Extract (3). What is merely revealed is the eyewitness account that Oat was with the monk. After that, he was no longer alive. The information between those incidents seems to be missing. For instance, what was Oat’s reaction after receiving desserts? Did he exhibit any sign of resistance? While he was being sexually molested, were there any villagers who heard him scream for help?
On 11 October 2016, the police of Mancha Khiri District […] told media that Niran Chonyuth, a 36-year-old Buddhist monk from Sawang Kongkaram Temple, had confessed to the rape and murder of a six-year-old boy referred to as Oat. […] Most witnesses told the police that Oat was last seen with the monk, who offered some desserts to the child. Prachatai, 11 October 2016.
All in all, the use of the explicitly aligned lexical items and the identification of perpetrators’ age are indicative of the infotainment role which concerns the sensationalism of news content (Mellado, 2015). It can be construed that the media may intend to vilify perpetrators which is, in turn, likely to provoke readers’ emotional responses. On the other hand, the representation of male victims is less tempestuous and rather associated with the civic role which concerns giving a voice to ordinary people (Mellado, 2015). In this study, the voice refers to that of witnesses.
Lexical Markers of Stance: Rape Co-occurring with Other Negative Lexical Items
The second emerging pattern pertains to the conjunction and which is used to conjoin rape and other words. The concordance lines are displayed in Table 5.
Sample from Concordance Line of the Lemma RAPE and Other Lexical Items Conjoined by AND.
Male perpetrators are represented as committing rape along with other material verb processes including bludgeon (line 1), force (line 2), kill (lines 3–4, 7, 14), murder (lines 5–6) and abuse (line 13). Given that rape is a material verb process of which a function is to foreground a concrete consequence which the actor does to the goal (Machin & Mayr, 2012), that it co-occurs with other verbs of a similar group seems to vilify perpetrators’ action on an intense basis. Apart from the verbs, such vilification is intensified through stance adverbials brutally (lines 5–6) and callously (line 6).
Upon investigation of the co-text, such vilification becomes increasingly apparent. Extract (4) displays negative lexical items which are associated with a male perpetrator including evil, appalling and shocking.
Evil struck the island of Koh Si Chang last Sunday afternoon when a local man raped and bludgeoned a young German tourist to death in an appalling and shocking crime. Thai Examiner 10 April 2019.
In a similar vein, Extract (5) expresses an opinion of a faction in Thai society which endorses capital punishment. By selecting to highlight the attitude which favours death penalty on Wanchai Sangkhao, the media might suggest that he deserves such punishment because of his engagement in the violent acts against an adolescent girl.
Dozens of Thai celebrities on Tuesday shared messages urging the Thai junta to amend the punishment for rapists to capital punishment after Wanchai Sangkhao, 22, confessed that he raped and killed a 13-year-old girl and threw her body out of the window of a train. Prachatai, 8 July 2014
Unlike that of male perpetrators, the representation of male victims appears to be less dramatic as exemplified in Extract (6). What can be construed is that men encounter double layers of victimisation. On a micro level, they suffer from ‘rape and sexual violence’. On a macro level, their ordeal is ‘neglected and hidden’ in Thai society. Worthy of note here is the use of patriarchal which modifies society. In fact, the overall meaning of this discourse is completely intelligible without the prepositional phrase in this patriarchal society. Consequently, its presence may imply that male rape is associated with such a social structure.
Nonetheless, the above propositions are mitigated by the stance adverbial somehow which is semantically linked with the notion of uncertainty. If the media adopted a more rigid stance, it could replace somehow with seriously or deliberately.
[…] male survivors of rape and sexual violence are somehow neglected and hidden in this patriarchal society. Bangkok Post, 14 March 2022.
All in all, that rape is made to co-occur with other negative lexical items suggests that the representation of perpetrators is associated with the infotainment role. In other words, the depiction of perpetrators as committing rape and other violent acts on a simultaneous basis may evoke readers’ deeper emotional responses.
Meanwhile, regarding male victims, the representation is connected with the intervention role which pertains to expressing the media’s own opinion and interpretation (Mellado, 2015). Compared to that of perpetrators, such an opinion is expressed on a less sensational basis.
Stance Adverbial: Allegedly
The third emerging pattern concerns a stance adverbial allegedly. Table 6 shows its concordance lines.
Two observable phenomena can be captured. First, the stance adverbial modifies a verb which is linked with a perpetrator as an actor (e.g., lines 2, 3 and 15). Second, the stance adverbial modifies a verb which is connected with a perpetrator as a goal (e.g., lines 1,6). In line 1, the actor is the police who performs a material verb process arrest. In line 6, although no actor is explicitly mentioned, it can be construed that individuals who have the authority to make a charge are law enforcement officers.
Sample from Concordance Line of Allegedly.
Regarding the first phenomenon, closer investigation into the co-text reveals that the media provide readers with background information concerning perpetrators’ past criminal record. Extract (7) shows that the man was a convicted rapist prior to committing the alleged rape. Meanwhile, Extract (8) gives voice to a perpetrator’s neighbour, making readers cognisant of his previous engagement in drug-related crime.
Checks confirmed he had been convicted of raping a minor in his home province of Sa Kaeo in 2013 and was released from prison four years ago before landing a job as head of security at the condo. After the Jan 4 rape, he fled and was caught in Sa Kaeo two days later. He allegedly admitted to having sexually assaulted the woman. Bangkok Post, 11 January 2022.
A young woman says she will not forgive the misdeeds of a contract labourer (who is subsequently called Mark) […] who allegedly raped her younger sister at his place. […] Neighbours say Mark, a former inmate who served a year inside for drugs, has been living at the rental place with his son Tee since his release. Bangkok Post, 23 January 2022.
The same is true for the second phenomenon. Additional information seems to reinforce an impression that those arrested men are actually criminals. In Extract (9), readers are made aware that the man not only attempted to rape the woman but also engaged in a string of unlawful acts. Like Extract (8), Extract (10) makes neighbour’s voice heard, accentuating the perpetrator’s negative image including being an ex-inmate who takes addictive substances.
A man was arrested on charges of assault, public indecency and carrying a weapon in public for allegedly attacking and attempting to rape a woman early Monday morning in northern Bangkok. […] In a state of inebriation, Suppakorn Kampol, right, lies on the floor at Don Mueang Police Station after being arrested for allegedly attempting to rape a woman. Khao Sod English, 6 February 2017.
Boonchuay Watchapo, 48, a neighbour, said that Anuwat was living with his grandmother and was jobless. He had been charged with allegedly taking narcotics and raping a boy. He was released from jail around four months ago, before allegedly committing this crime. The Nation, 11 February 2021.
These characteristics in both phenomena partially overlap with those of previous studies. For example, perpetrators fall under the influence of drugs or alcohol, carry some weapons especially a gun or a knife (Mellink et al., 2022) and have a history of prior apprehension (Khoshnood et al., 2022). In particular, the association between men having a weapon and being a rape offender is also demonstrated in a form of pictorial representation (Riaz, 2021).
However, a point which remains difficult to compare is that perpetrators have ‘pronounced problems with psychiatric disorders’ (Khoshnood et al., 2022, p. 601). In this study, there seems to be insufficient evidence concerning the mental condition of perpetrators. Instead, the media tend to focus on other aspects of their criminal disposition.
Notwithstanding the use of a hedging adverbial allegedly, the media contexualise their discourse in a way that reinforces a tendency for male suspects to commit rape. In other words, the literal meaning of allegedly which concerns a degree of uncertainty is diluted and it appears that the representation has already pronounced against those suspects. Such a media stance might be the reason for the absence of the mental illness aspect as it has been argued elsewhere that representing perpetrators as mentally ill or ‘crazy’ may prompt readers to perceive that these men could not be or are actually not offenders (Merken & James, 2020 quotation in original).
All in all, such depiction of male suspects corresponds to the intervention role which pertains to expressing media’s interpretations of a particular event (Mellado, 2015). Regarding the representation of male victims, a question arises as to why this pattern is virtually absent. It is even more abstruse given that this pattern is used with female victims (as evidenced in concordance line 8).
Stance Noun and a Prepositional Phrase: By + Perpetrator
It is generally understood that a by-phrase in a passive construction can be omitted without affecting comprehensibility. However, the findings here reveal the presence of this pattern as displayed in Table 7.
Sample from Concordance Line of by.
Previous studies (e.g., Bohmert et al., 2019; Meluzzi et al., 2021) reveal that an agentless passive construction signifies an attempt to absolve male perpetrators of responsibility. In this study, on the contrary, the media clearly indicate the agent through a by-phrase. Notably, perpetrators are people familiar with victims. For instance, they are a family member (lines 1, 4–6), a fellow student (line 2) and a senior monk who resides in the same temple (line 7). Hence, it can be inferred that such representation aims to remind readers of the existence of acquaintance rape in the Thai society.
Upon the investigation of the co-text, additional information pertaining to acquaintance rape is obtained. Arguably, the commonality between Extracts (11) and (12) is a notion of male authority derived from superior social status (an abbot against a meditation trainee and a stepfather against a stepdaughter respectively). Through a by-phrase passive construction which clearly indicates such status, men in the community are represented as exercising their authority in the form of being a sexually abusive perpetrator.
This is in contrast with the portrayal of acquaintance rape in Dutch newspapers in which ‘sexual danger was seen as emanating exclusively from outside the family and the community’ (Wilkinson, 2022, p. 16). In other words, men in the community are misleadingly represented as exercising their authority in the form of being a protector against outside perpetrators (Wilkinson, 2022).
The abbot, who periodically led her and her friends in meditation, picked her up at the nurse’s office and took her to the temple. At the temple, he gave her a drugged bottle of water that caused her to pass out. […] The abbot then raped her. […] Her mother, who raised her as a single parent, noticed in August that the now 18-year-old’s belly was unusually swollen. The daughter admitted that she had been raped by the abbot for five years. Khao Sod English, 3 September 2019.
The victim told police she had been repeatedly raped by her 57-year-old stepfather since November 2019. The man, who had lived with the Grade 6 student’s mother for 7 years, is reported to have taken advantage of the long hours her mother worked in local farms, leaving him and the victim together for lengthy periods. Chiang Mai City Life, 8 July 2020.
Regarding male victims, Extracts (13) and (14) portray the cultural context in which young Thai boys are placed. For certain Thais, traditional values of having their sons ordained, be it on a temporary or permanent basis, are still cherished. This underlines the need for the newly ordained to acquaint themselves with social circles in temples. One of them includes monks who typically earn trust due to their esteemed role in Thai society (Jeamjitvibool et al., 2022). It is exemplified in the fact that, apart from performing religious rituals, they are culturally regarded as healers who provide templegoers with various treatments such as ‘herbal medicine, meditation, exorcism of evil spirits and physical therapies’ (Pengpid & Peltzer, 2021, p. 2).
[…] a young Buddhist novice referred to as ‘Tong’, who was ordained at a temple in Phurue District of Loei Province, was anal raped by a group of senior monks […] including the abbot of the temple. Prachatai, 11 October 2016.
Jaded said that most victims of sexual assault by monks are young boys, since young boys in Thailand have to train with monks in temples. Prachatai, 17 October 2019.
All in all, the media seemingly enunciate the presence of acquaintance rape through the use of a non-truncated passive construction. In a broader context, it also squares with the survey which discloses the prevalence of acquaintance rape in Thailand. It accounts for 86% of rape cases, with the most considerable number involving neighbours (25%) (Skinnider et al., 2017).
Moreover, using a by-phrase in this context may be served to warn readers of the danger posed by people whom they least expect. This resonates with the service role which involves emphasis on the consequences or meaning ‘that certain facts or events have for people’s everyday life’ (Mellado, 2015, p. 606). Additionally, by giving voice to certain factions such as the victim’s relatives and an NGO officer regarding the issue of acquaintance rape, the media are seen to perform the civic role.
Conclusion
This study has identified several linguistic structures which the Thai media employ to represent men in rape coverage. They are, to a certain extent, associated with some dimensions of the journalistic role performance.
First, lexical markers of stance are employed in a way that seemingly vilifies male perpetrators. For instance, a phrase pertaining to their age (e.g., a 42-year-old man) is used to accentuate the fact that they are older than victims (e.g., a 6-year-old boy). Notably, the portrayal of age seniority as an element enabling perpetrators to be inherently superior to their victims is attributable to a cultural aspect. In Thailand, age seniority remains one of the factors contributing to power and respect (Kulophas & Hallinger, 2021). Besides, perpetrators’ action is represented by the instance of rape occurring simultaneously with other material verb processes such as force and kill. Taken together, both instances may be associated with the notion of augmented agency to inflict physical harm upon the younger target. By discursively projecting the overwhelmingly negative images of perpetrators, the media perform the infotainment role which seeks to sensationalise news content and evoke readers’ emotional responses (Mellado, 2015).
Second, a stance adverbial allegedly is utilised (e.g., a security guard who allegedly raped a condo resident). On the surface, its meaning implies that the media are uncertain as to whether perpetrators actually commit the rape. Nonetheless, the investigation of the co-text reveals that the adverbial is likely to occur in the context in which perpetrators’ past criminal record is delineated. Furthermore, perpetrators’ tarnished history is explicitly represented in a form of a narrative from their neighbours. This reflects a contradiction between the literal meaning of allegedly and the co-text which aligns itself with the vilification of perpetrators. Arguably, the media perform the intervention role by expressing their own stance towards the status of perpetrators by making a judgement against those men.
Third, it is the use of a non-truncated passive construction (e.g., a young Buddhist novice was anal raped by a group of senior monks). Notably, the agent in a by-phrase is primarily individuals known to victims such as a family member and a monk residing in the same temple. By expressly incorporating such information, the media perform the service role by reminding readers of the presence of acquaintance rape in Thai society.
In relation to the four classifications reviewed in the Men and a Rape Issue from the Perspectives of the Media Section, the representation of Thai perpetrators does not fit neatly into them. For example, regarding the aforementioned age seniority, it partially overlaps with the second type of perpetrators (the sex slavery), but the Thai perpetrators are not represented as holding victims captive or engaging in extremely sadistic sexual actions. Furthermore, the ‘outdoor settings’ as portrayed in the first (the lonely perverts) and fourth (the suburb rape) types are not foregrounded. The same is true for the issues pertaining to race and being an immigrant. The latter, particularly first-generation immigrants, forms the majority of rape perpetrators in a Swedish context (Khoshnood et al., 2022). That being said, the findings in the current study do not show ample evidence to the point of being able to assert a new classification. Hence, future studies are warranted.
Concerning the classification of male victims, this study reveals several nuances from the previous study reviewed earlier (Mgolozeli & Duma, 2019). First, the acquaintance rape in the previous study is related to trusted people such as friends and family members. In addition to those people, the emphasised trusted individuals in the current study are Buddhist monks. Second, male victims of the gang rape in the previous study report the cases of being intoxicated or molested because of their perceived misconduct such as girlish dressing and grooming. Such cases are not highlighted in the present study. Instead, the media reveal that the gang rape occurs within a religious setting. Their emphasis on the inappropriate behaviour of Thai monks squares with past research regarding effeminate monks in Thailand (Chladek, 2021; Schedneck, 2021). Future studies, therefore, are encouraged to investigate the media representation and their role performance pertaining to this issue.
In fact, the representation of male victims in proportion to that of male perpetrators is remarkably limited. Moreover, the existing representation fails to give them an equivalent amount of agency. This is manifested through the intervention role. From the media depiction, male victims are neglected, and such ignorance is associated with patriarchy in Thai society. However, the strength of such an opinion is reduced by a hedging adverbial somehow. Such feeble attempt to assert the rights of male victims might render readers sceptical about the centrality of the issue. Besides, regarding the civic role, voice is given to their surrounding people such as witnesses, neighbours and NGO officers instead of the victims themselves.
Given that one of the functions of the intervention role is to propose or demand change to any event or topic (Mellado, 2015), the findings indicate a limited amount of representation in an attempt to dispel male rape myths. Such misunderstandings are sorely in need of change because they can lead to devastating consequences explicated in the Introduction section. Additionally, the watchdog role can be performed to scrutinise signs of negative attitudes from the Thai authorities towards male victims. This might be the case as it has been evidenced elsewhere that some myths persist among the police such as a presumption that all victims are homosexual and male rape is an inconsequential issue (Javaid, 2019).
The media coverage of the current study covers a time span of 15 years (2007–2022). Notably, the statistical computation by the AntConc program and the subsequent qualitative analysis do not provide linguistic evidence concerning diachronic development of the issue. However, other computer programs, such as Wayback Machine, have been documented to record and archive past versions of websites, thus tracking linguistic changes over time (Berezkina, 2018). Therefore, future studies are encouraged to experiment with those programs to explore possible diachronic changes regarding the media representation of this issue. They can include, for example, a pattern of rape in Thai society or the characteristics of male perpetrators and victims.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.