• Citer

Alive and unimagined: (mis)representations of victims and survivors of psychotrauma resulting from sexual and domestic violence in the French Belgian press

par Broustau, Nadège ;Rodot, Florian
Editeur scientifique Jacobs, Thomas;Zienkowski, Jan
Référence Imaginaries and Discourses of Politics, Community, and Economy, Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, Vol. 1
Publication Soumis pour publication, 2027-08

Partie d'ouvrage collectif

• Détails
• Contenu

Résumé :

This paper focuses on the representations and blind spots of psychotrauma in the coverage of sexual and domestic violence in the Belgian press between 2021 and 2025. Our research looks at the role of media in the social construction of reality from the perspective of what Ricoeur called the “semantic power of imagination” (Ricoeur, 1994), a productive tie between imagination and semantic innovation that makes a phenomenon tangible. We thus aim to enhance how what is un-thought and un-thinkable remains unimaginable, how what is not named does not socially exist, did not, can not or does not happen, remaining unknown.Although the medical literature about psychotrauma has increased since the official definition of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Secondary Traumatic Stress (STS) in psychiatry, especially following the Vietnam war (Freese, 2019 ; Damiani & Lebigot, 2015), social and media representations of this health issue are still blurred by reductive imaginaries. From misconceptions of traumatic situations like rapes or other life-threatening events to underestimation of their long-term psychological, physical and physiological consequences, victims and survivors have to deal with “social invisibilities” (according to the definition of these invisibilities in Le Blanc, 2009) and misunderstandings that obstruct and undermine their path to healing (Josse, 2019; Roisin, 2015) and insight abilities (Jaafari & Marková, 2011). Stereotypes and lack of knowledge about psychotrauma in the public sphere also reinforce the altered image that non-specialists health professionals summon in their interpretive and diagnostic process (Kédia & Sabouraud-Séguin, 2020). Reductive or empty imaginaries fuel stigma and self-stigmatization, and form severe hindrances to social recognition (as defined by Honneth, 1995) by notably reinforcing denial and denigration that are major parts of sexual and domestic violence process.Using NVivo and the Reinert method of lexicometry, our study is based on a mixed content analysis. The initial corpus consists of 12 871 articles published in local and national French Belgian newspapers, from the “#BalanceTonBar” movement in 2021 until the aftermath of the Mazan rape trial in 2025. Three national and three local newspapers have been analysed: Le Soir, La Libre, La Dernière Heure (DH); L’Avenir, La Meuse, La Nouvelle Gazette.Five main hypotheses led our exploration of blind spots and invisibility:1. predominant categories of meanings associated to traumatism are nor linked to a specific mental disorder neither to sexual or domestic violence;2. global short-term vision of traumatic events’ consequences;3. detailed focus on aggressors contrasting with the portrayal of the victims;4. tension between incredulity and trivialization;5. obliterated symptoms and absence-silence about implications of psychotrauma.The results confirm the hypotheses and stress the particular saliences and silences regarding the media coverage of trauma, sexual and domestic violence in the French Belgian press. Our study demonstrates how what is left unimagined participates to the damage of psychotrauma resulting from intentional violence, while taking into account the potential dominating as well as liberating aspects of this mechanism of invisibilization of suffering (Herzog, 2019).