Big Data Techniques to Study the Impact of Gender-Based Violence in the Spanish News Media

Abstract

Despite being an underreported topic in the news media, gender-based violence (GBV) undermines the health, dignity, security and autonomy of its victims. Research has studied many of the factors that generate or maintain this kind of violence. However, the influence of the media is still uncertain. This paper used Big Data techniques to explore how GBV is depicted and reported in digital news media. By feeding neural networks with news, the topic information associated with each article can be recovered. Our findings show a relationship between GBV news and public awareness, the effect of well-known GBV cases, and the intrinsic thematic relationship of GBV news with justice themes.