Representation of Rape Victims and Perpetrators in Thai News Articles and its Implications for Rape Myths

In  this  paper,  we explore how  perpetrators  and  victims  are represented in Thai online news articleswhere the topic is rape.The articleswerewritten in Englishand we analysedthemthroughHalliday’sview on Transitivity and van Leeuwen’s approach to participant roles viahis Social Actor Framework(i.e., we used a text linguisticsapproachto analyse clausal-and  phrasal-level features  of  discoursebased  onSystemic Functional Linguistics). Ourdata consistedof thirty online news articles (10 each) from threepopularThai news outlets:Bangkok Post, The  Nation,  and Khaosod  English.Findings revealedspecific linguistic patterns were used to represent victims and perpetrators in news  stories  where rape was  the  topic. Namely,  material  processes were  most  frequently  used to  represent perpetrators  asactive  agents and victims as being passive. It wasalso found that perpetrators and victims were mainlydescribed through the categoryof Functionalization;inother words, interms of an activity or something they do as well asclassificationin terms of age, gender,and race. The main differenceinthe representation between these two social groupswasthe use of Nomination and Physical Identification. Based on our findings, weshedlight  on  the implications  for  certain  rape  myths  and  ideologies,especially the myth of blamingvictims for arape.