Possession, witness or victim: A linguistic analysis of how children are positioned in discourses about family violence

Purpose
Although the impacts of family violence on children are profound and lifelong, children are often invisible victim/survivors of family violence. This marginalization occurs both through the actions of adults around them and through the language used to discuss or occlude their suffering. A widely recognized example of this pattern is treating children as witnesses rather than victim/survivors. In this paper we explore how linguistic structures and word choices position children in submissions to two Australian inquiries that have addressed issues of child safety in the context of family violence from distinct perspectives, as set out in their terms of reference. The project was designed to understand the current positioning of children, any effects of the different foci and to consider ways of using language that are best for highlighting children’s experiences that align with their rights and realities.

Methods
The analysis addresses how children are positioned in discourse by focusing on the linguistic details of the submissions. We compiled comparable submissions into two corpora of their texts, each over two million words in size. We then used corpus linguistic tools to examine child and children and grammatical and lexical (word) choices surrounding their use in the organizational writing.

Results
With a particular focus on children as subjects of clauses, objects of clauses, the modifier of nouns and as possessors, the results reveal the forms that most meaningfully and frequently cooccur (measured by logDice Score) with child/ren and important ways these differ across the two corpora. Differences in both grammatical structures and word choices highlight key considerations relating to the position of children in professional discourse surrounding family violence, including foregrounding of their experiences and agency.

Conclusions
The inquiry that had children’s needs central to its aims was associated with word choices that amplify children’s individual capacities and experiences. This corpus of writing has a greater diversity of verbs and nouns associated with children with submission writers taking up the opportunities to consider children in more holistic ways that were offered in the terms of reference for the inquiry concerned.