Femicide in polish press and media

A Matter of Linguistic Sensitivity or What Is Symbolic Violence?

The language used to talk about violence against women and femicides matters. Why?

Behind language stand concrete images that help audiences organize their understanding of the world, assign roles to actors, connect causes with consequences, identify patterns, and classify events. The language of law and the way we speak about criminal phenomena such as femicide require an additional degree of sensitivity. As Judith Butler wrote, language performs a performative function: it shapes reality, scripts social scenarios, and often mercilessly categorizes people.

One of the aims of this project is to raise awareness of the enormous role that public discourse plays in discussing femicide. This includes both naming the killing of women because of their gender for what it is—femicide—and becoming more sensitive to the language used in describing perpetrators, victims, and their loved ones. I will not use terms such as “monster” or “victim,” because neither fully captures the phenomenon of femicide. Calling perpetrators “monsters” creates the illusion that murder can only be committed by someone alien, insane, or devoid of human feeling. Yet, as data collected through the Polish Femicide Map demonstrates, most perpetrators are people well known to the harmed individuals, acting with full awareness of their actions, and the killing is usually preceded by a prolonged process of abuse.

I will also avoid using the term “victim” in relation to women who experienced violence. Instead, I use the term “survivor” for women who survived violence, and “injured party” or “harmed person” when referring to murdered women. Having worked in the anti-violence field for several years, I have observed that people harmed by violence often strive to “leave the role of the victim” in order to regain agency and rebuild balance in their lives. When speaking and writing about violence, we adopt the perspective of harmed individuals and their loved ones, in the spirit of feminist victimology—focused on the trauma experienced by those subjected to violence.

Polish lawmakers have already reached the point where, in discussing domestic violence, they use terms such as “person using violence” and “person experiencing violence.” Why, then, should the language used to describe violent behavior not also move beyond the paradigm of the “monster” and the “victim”? To change the law, however, we must first begin with everyday language—the language ordinary people use when speaking about femicide, and the language used in the press. But how is femicide currently described in public discourse, and can we truly say that this language is informative, objective, and free of stereotypes and judgment?

I encourage readers to explore the report Femicide in the Polish Press. Report for the Years 2016–2026, in which I discuss both harmful and constructive ways of talking about femicide and violence against women.

In the report, I identified six harmful narratives: macabrization (including animalization), stigmatization and stereotyping, romanticization, trivialization, sensationalism, and humorization. Why are these harmful?

Each of these narratives distorts the perception of violence. They shift attention away from the act itself and toward its circumstances, from the perpetrator’s responsibility toward emotions, and from the harmed person’s experience toward the attractiveness of the story. As a result, the audience does not receive a full picture of violence as a social phenomenon requiring prevention, but rather a sensationalized fragment detached from context.

Their harmfulness lies in the fact that, instead of supporting prevention and education, they contribute to the normalization of violence. They blur the perpetrator’s responsibility and redirect attention to sensational or emotional aspects of the event. In doing so, language does not merely describe reality—it co-creates the social understanding of reality, shaping whether violence against women is properly named and recognized, or instead distorted and simplified for the sake of media clickability.

In academic literature, this phenomenon is referred to as symbolic violence (violence symbolique). The term was introduced into public discourse by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Symbolic violence is a subtle, invisible form of violence that operates primarily through symbols and communication. A person subjected to one of these harmful narratives is harmed a second time—they die symbolically. As Bourdieu emphasized, symbolic violence makes inequality and harm appear natural and therefore invisible. This is precisely why certain media narratives may, in practice, reproduce and reinforce violence.

Below are several examples of harmful narratives from the Polish press reporting on femicides:

Conclusions

The way we speak about violence against women is not merely a matter of journalistic style or scholarly convention—it is a matter of social responsibility.

Such responsibility is required not only from journalists, but from everyone working with violence-related issues and handling graphic or sensitive material. The narratives analyzed above demonstrate that language can not only describe violence, but also distort it, trivialize it, and conceal its systemic nature. Therefore, counteracting these practices cannot be limited to individual editorial choices. In line with United Nations guidelines, it should become part of broader regulatory standards for public communication and of national anti-violence strategies.

The importance of this responsibility is also emphasized in the Istanbul Convention.

According to Article 17:
“Parties shall encourage the media and the private sector to participate in the elaboration and implementation of policies and to set guidelines and self-regulatory standards to prevent violence against women and to enhance respect for their dignity.”

This means that the media are not merely passive observers of reality, but active participants in shaping social attitudes toward violence against women.

In this context, adopting the survivor-centred and trauma-sensitive approach—already present in Spanish and British criminology—becomes crucial. These approaches focus respectively on the person experiencing violence and on taking into account the trauma experienced by survivors and their living relatives. They require constructing narratives that prioritize the safety, dignity, and subjectivity of the harmed person and the grief of their loved ones, rather than media attractiveness or sensational value.

Closely connected to this is the perspective of feminist victimology, which emphasizes the need to analyze violence within the broader context of gender inequality, power relations, and structural social conditions.

Applying these perspectives in practice and in work involving sensitive material means abandoning simplistic, sensationalist, or stigmatizing narratives in favor of language that is precise, contextualized, and responsible. It also means shifting attention—from the form of the narrative to the experience of violence itself and its underlying causes.

It should be remembered that although violence against women is well described in legal and criminological literature, the way society understands it—and therefore the effectiveness of prevention efforts—is largely shaped through language and mass media communication. We must also remember that media language shapes not only the attitudes and perceptions of ordinary audiences, but also those of representatives of the justice system.

That is why the way we speak about violence matters. It requires social responsibility and sensitivity to language, which—through the six harmful narratives described above—can symbolically reproduce violence.

Making monsters from perpetrators relieves us of the need to understand how ordinary people become capable of cruelty

David Livingstone Smith, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others