Constructing the 'Perfect Victim': Media Language, Headlines, and Hierarchies of Justice in Newspaper Rape Reports

This study interrogates how Nigerian newspaper reportage linguistically constructs the “perfect victim” and produces a hierarchical representation of rape victims. While prior studies have examined rape narratives through qualitative and discourse-analytic approaches, limited attention has been given to large-scale corpus-assisted critical stylistics analysis within the Nigerian context. Addressing this gap, the study adopts a Corpus-Assisted Critical Stylistics (CACS) framework, integrating Corpus Linguistics, Critical Stylistics, Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis, and Framing Theory. A specialised corpus of 893 newspaper articles (2017–2025) was analysed using AntConc 4 through an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design. Findings reveal a systematic “victim hierarchy” encoded through lexical and syntactic choices: minors are constructed as “perfect victims” through innocence markers and intensified verbs such as “defile,” while adult women are framed with hedges like “allegedly,” introducing doubt and moral scrutiny. The study further demonstrates that passivisation and nominalisation obscure perpetrator agency while foregrounding victim vulnerability and due to this, media discourse both reflects and sustains rape culture by distributing sympathy unevenly and conditioning justice on linguistic framing. The study concludes that the “perfect victim” is a linguistic construct rather than a social reality and recommends linguistically informed media guidelines, increased use of active constructions to foreground perpetrators, and further corpus-based research into media representations of gender-based violence.