THE GRAMMAR OF ACCOUNTABILITY: MEDIA LANGUAGE AND THE REPRESENTATION OF AGENCY IN GENDER-BASED VIOLENCE IN ZAMBIA

This article examines the ways in which grammar functions to hold people accountable with regard to gender-based violence (GBV) through the lens of media coverage in Zambia. In doing so this paper extends and builds upon an exploratory study of agency distribution, obscuration and contestation in news discourse using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA). The data was collected from a qualitative examination of newspaper articles, online reports and associated digital comments published in Zambia between January 2025 to August of 2025. These texts were analyzed closely with particular attention paid to passive voice, transitivity, nominalization, and lexical choice, headline design, quotation patterns and reporting practices regarding survivors and accused individuals. A key contention of this research is that grammar is not simply a stylistic matter, but can be used as a social and ideological tool that either places perpetrator responsibility front and-center or allows violence to appear natural, private, accidental or morally ambiguous in public discourse. An expanded scope of analysis suggests that many reports continue to use grammatical constructions similar to "woman raped", "wife beaten to death", where the subject of the sentence is placed at the center of the clause and the agent performing the action is made invisible or secondary. However, the report also finds a developing counter discourse among some journalists who utilize active clauses, cite institutional agents and represent GBV as a problem of justice, policy and rights rather than as spectacle. Situating these findings within existing debates surrounding discourse, patriarchy and ethical considerations for journalism, this research contributes to scholarship examining the relationship between language, power and discourse while providing practical recommendation for newsroom practitioners, journalism educators, regulatory bodies and advocacy organizations working against GBV.