Abstract
This paper seeks to shed light on social readings about sexual violence against women, based on the collective rape against a teenager in Rio de Janeiro in 2016. Taking news and comments from readers of the G1 Portal as empirical, the aim is to understand whether a consensual or discordant tonic prevailed in the appropriation of the fact. The theoretical contribution triggers the notions of event and framing, representation, public problem, values, and norms. The method articulates a quantification of the statements and qualitative dimensions extracted from the conceptual axis. The analysis presents the existence of disputes about the meaning of the event, especially among news readers. It also shows the tendency towards representations of the victim and suspects based on female behavior – taken as a base line of the meanings attributed to what happened. The proposed solutions emphasize punishment and palliative responses to a structural problem.
Keywords
event; gang rape; public problem; representation; values and norms