“Humans have a passion for knowing what other

people are doing and have the capacity to be

sympathetic for those who have suffered” :

AN ANALYSIS OF THE REPRESENTATION OF

VERBAL ABUSE AND BULLYING IN ONLINE AND
SOCIAL MEDIA

BY AAKRITI GHAI

UNIT APG5858 : RESEARCH THESIS B

MASTER OF COMMUNICATIONS AND MEDIA

STUDIES

MONASH UNIVERSITY

29TH JUNE 2021

CONTENTS :

1. ABSTRACT 3

2.CHAPTER ONE : INTRODUCTION 4-8

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3.CHAPTER TWO : REVIEW OF LITERATURE 9-14

4.CHAPTER THREE : METHODOLOGY 15-19

3.CHAPTER FOUR : RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS 20-35

4.CHAPTER FIVE : CONCLUSION 36-39

5. BIBLIOGRAPHY 40-47 ABSTRACT : The issue of verbal abuse is an issue of great

social significance that deserves the appropriate attention and representation from
the media. In the time of the digital age and the communication of all information
being done by the various social media platforms, this study aims at analyzing the
ways in which the important topic of verbal abuse as bullying has been shown and
spoken about on the various social media platforms. This research study also
analyses the traditional media representations of verbal abuse and bullying, by
studying the news reports of incidents and news of verbal abuse in Australia. A
comparison is also drawn between the personal narratives in the media of the victims
of verbal abuse as well as the reported news stories, which leads to a comparison
between the social media representations of verbal abuse and the traditional media
representations of the same. A review of literature is carried out and themes such as
storytelling in the media, digital storytelling on social media, trolling in the media,
social media affordances and the traditional media representations are studied in the
context of verbal abuse and its representation. A total of 40-42media sources are
chosen and analysed through the method of discourse analysis. The data sources
include both social media sources as well as the traditional media sources and are
chosen from the date range of January 2017- June 2021. The data is divided into 7
different media themes, where it is compared, analysed and interpreted, with the help
of evidence from literature which compliments the understanding of that particular
theme. The findings suggest that the reported media stories of verbal abuse are
represented in a sensational manner to increase the newsworthiness of the news
story and the personal narratives of verbal abuse on social media lead to a form of
interaction. The concept of media framing is used by social organizations to
represent verbal abuse is described in the findings of the study along with
establishing a relationship between online trolling and the social media platforms and
their features. The traditional media reports the issue of verbal abuse in a manner
which makes the story sensational whereas social media majorly focuses on the
personal narratives of the victim. The issues of workplace bullying and racial verbal
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abuse are represented in a manner which increases the newsworthiness of the story
and racial verbal abuse on social media is represented in a manner that aims to
engage the media users and promote collective action through storytelling.
The indications of future research suggest that there should be further research on
the media representations of the laws against verbal abuse as well as why this verbal
abuse takes place in the first place.
CHAPTER ONE : INTRODUCTION

Mediated communication, through the new age of digital technology and media,
compliments and substitutes real-life interactions and the way in which the media users
make use of the media to share information, to create bonds, and most importantly to
express themselves (De Fina 2016, p. 473-474). Therefore, social media is an important
aspect of the way information is shared today and this research study aims at analysing the
representation of verbal abuse on social media platforms as well as the traditional media
news reports of the same. I have selected relevant media sources from platforms such as
Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Instagram and blogging websites. I will also be selecting and
analysing secondary sources such as newspaper articles from legacy media outlets such as
the ABC news, The SBS news, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

Other relevant sources from different media outlets have also been selected to support my
research. I have first, briefly, analysed and defined, with evidence, what I mean by verbal
abuse and have subsequently defined the media related themes of the same, on which I will
develop my study, in the following sections. These include what is verbal abuse, the media
representation of verbal abuse, media facilitation of verbal abuse and traditional media and
verbal abuse stories. These themes are further developed through the review of literature. I
then go on to introduce the research design, scope and significance of research. I have
developed different themes of literature on which I have based my literature review and
have then subsequently analysed my data, by conducting a discourse analysis on the media
texts and studying them under different categories, on the basis of what they say. Lastly, I
draw conclusions and answer my research questions and give indications towards future
research.

WHAT IS VERBAL ABUSE?

The messages that involve attacking the self - concept of another person, with the aim of
delivering psychological pain, reflect verbal aggression and abuse (Infante & Wigley 1986).
For instance, stigmatizing the person’s personality, chastising their competence as a
relational partner, teasing, swearing, ridiculing their background and shortcomings, their
physical appearance, threatening to punish the person, and the use of obscenities against
the person, are the most common examples of such verbal messages (Infante &Wigley
1986, p 61-69). Verbal abuse alone can result in psychological damage and these effects
have the potential to be equally or more damaging than those associated with physical
abuse (Brandt and Pierce 2000, p 71) Therefore, verbal abuse, like physical abuse, can be
a stigmatized issue causing long-term effects on the wellbeing of the victim.Therefore, in the
light of the above concepts, it becomes extremely relevant to explore the media

3
representations of verbal abuse and how it is represented in the media and by the media
users.

THE MEDIA REPRESENTATION OF VERBAL ABUSE

Storytelling is the most common form of discourse in human communications, and with the
increasing popularity of the technological influences in our life, it has had a significant impact
on the types of narratives that are produced and received (De Fina 2016, 473- 498).
According to De Fina (2016, p 473-498), it is now, not only, about the stories that are told
but also about the people who narrate these stories and those who listen to them, in the
different social contexts where these narratives take place and are used.
This storytelling is facilitated by the media and its users. A form of storytelling, explored
in this study, is the concept of digital storytelling on modern social media platforms.
Digital storytelling adapts a poetic reflection and is focused on personal experiences and
reflections of the storytellers (Lambert and Hessler 2018, p 29).

Emily Keats and Micheal Humphrey (2019) draw on the real-life example of the Youtube
celebrity vlogger Shane Dawson and his experience of sharing his personal story of coming
out as bisexual in the YouTube video “I’m bisexual”, and state how this reflects the potential
narrative storytelling power of social networking for all people. Similarly, in one of the
research studies called “From Silence to #WhyIStayed: Locating Our Stories and Finding
Our Voices”, Melinda Weathers, Jimmy Sanderson, Alec Neal, and Kelly Gramlich (2016) go
on to describe how a social networking platform such as Twitter utilizes human elements to
allow abuse survivors to share their personal experiences. It seems incongruous, then, that
the very platform and technology of social media that enables abusers in the form of trolling
and bullying online can also be used as a source of healing and to promote understanding.
Yet numerous studies, such as the aforementioned Keats and Humphrey and Weathers et
al. show that is exactly what is happening.
Social media platforms provide a powerful space for the victim’s voices to be heard by many
people. They are also used as an avenue to reach a large number of audiences, who
otherwise would not have been able to hear these stories (Weathers et al 2016, p 66) In the
times of crisis such as issues of abuse and violence, it is very important to both recognize
and utilize conversational human voices and experiences and, therefore, social media sites
such as Twitter, in order to foster and bring about future conversations and understanding of
the social issues such as domestic violence (Weathers et al 2016, p 66).

THE MEDIA FACILITATION OF VERBAL ABUSE

Online social media is not only a platform to share the existing experiences of this verbal
abuse, but a platform that also facilitates this verbally abusive behavior, in the form of
“online trolls” (Veiga Simão et. al 2018). Verbal aggression can be seen to be a
“manifestation of cyberbullying” and in the cyberbullying contexts, aggressive content is
used in a virtual context to harm others and malicious comments are often used to express
anger, “have fun” and resolve the feelings of dissatisfaction (Veiga Simão et al 2018, p
4789 ). According to Simão (2018), this form of verbal aggression emerges from the

4
undetermined social and communicative norms, which are seen as being common to social
media. The social media “comments'' online are often seen as ambiguous, as they can be
interpreted as humorous or as hostile, and therefore, it is important to understand its social
and cultural implications. Thus, more research is required to understand this type of
aggressive content that is posted online (Veiga Simão et. al 2018, p 4789 ). Bishop (2014)
explores the internet-led, written verbal abuse - called “trolling”, which has been used to
describe online verbal abuse. There is a clear distinction between how this “trolling” is
represented on different media platforms and the representation of this form of verbal abuse
varies on the new-age digital media platforms and on the traditional media platforms such as
the different newspapers and television channels (Bishop 2014, p 7 ). Online verbal
aggression poses the important issue of the anonymity of the abuser as they maintain a
hidden profile as they write offensive written content (Veiga Simão et. al 2018, p 4789).
TRADITIONAL MEDIA AND VERBAL ABUSE STORIES

It is very well documented that TV and radio are extremely important media globally and in
Australia. According to Griffin-Foley (2014, in Cunningham and Turnbull, p 133), radio is the
most pervasive medium in Australia, and Harrington (2014) in the same book claims that
television is and will remain, for some time, the most popular media source in Australia.
Media has the persuasive power to construct and dispense social knowledge as it tends to
formulate an issue as a social problem - a tactic important for gaining public awareness for
the social issue (Maydell 2018, p 708).
In her study of the newspaper representation of child abuse, Maydell (2018, p 709)
describes the different strategies adopted by the traditional media platforms to frame the
coverage of such issues and the tendency of the media to become more inclined towards its
sensationalist coverage rather than investigating the mechanisms behind the issue.
Although my study is not about child abuse, the basic concepts that Maydell uses inform my
research study as I am studying how traditional media represents the issue of verbal abuse.
Therefore, I aim at studying framing of the coverage of verbal abuse as well as finding out if
the reporting of verbal abuse also adapts a “sensationalist” aspect by the traditional media
platforms, as does the coverage of child abuse studied by Maydell (2018).

THE RESEARCH DESIGN

The above background to research led to the following research questions,

that the study aims to answer:-

1. How is verbal abuse represented in the new age of social media and by its
media users?

2. How does the online news and social media report verbal abuse and bullying
stories?

3. What is the difference between the traditional media representation of verbal

abuse and the new-age social media representation of the same?

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I aim to explore the various media platforms and the communication about verbal abuse that
takes place on the social media platforms as well as the traditional media platforms and how
the media showcases, represents and communicates the social issue of verbal abuse and
bullying. I also aim to answer my primary research questions of how verbal abuse and
bullying is represented and reported in the media, through a study and the exploration of the
following media concepts and their relation to verbal abuse. These include storytelling in the
media, traditional media reporting, social media platforms and their affordances, and digital
storytelling on these platforms. I argue that first-person storytelling has been used more in
revealing the truth about victim abuse than mainstream media reporting and I aim at proving
this hypothesis through my research study.

In order to answer and explore the above research questions, the research study will be
adapting the qualitative method of discourse analysis. Hall (1997) describes discourse
analysis as a method that involves adopting a systematic and qualitative analysis of the
data, to find the hidden meanings in texts, images, and videos. Therefore, I will be
conducting a discourse analysis on the media texts such as social media posts and
newspaper articles. I will be analyzing the language used and deriving meaning from what is
written or said through these media sources, about verbal abuse. I will also be using
secondary sources and relevant literature to derive meaning and analyse my results. The
data will include the images, texts, and videos presented on the media platforms that speak
about verbal abuse.

Thus, with the above-described concepts, the research study will first explore the academic
literature on the media representation of verbal abuse and the resulting impact of verbal
abuse. There will be an exploration and analysis of the academic sources and the research
questions will further be developed from the same. The data collection process would
involve collecting the relevant sources of literature and the existing content on social media
platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. The methodology will involve
studying this data through the method of discourse analysis, which will lead to the results
and a discussion of the findings, including the research gaps, a comparison with the existing
literature and the significance of research findings as well as the unique findings of the
research, which would lead to the conclusions to be drawn from the research study.

SCOPE OF RESEARCH AND SIGNIFICANCE OF RESEARCH

The focus and scope of the research has been narrowed down to a few social media
platforms and traditional media platforms such as newspapers and by the type of media
users - reporters of newspapers, who produce news reports for the news channels and the
media users who have shared their stories of verbal abuse on social media. This research
study does not seek to determine the psychological effects of sharing the verbal abuse
stories on the various media platforms by the abuse victims. It does not aim at exploring the
impact of using the media platforms to narrate the abuse stories by the victims, this being
beyond the scope of this study within its media and communications discipline. The
psychological impact of verbal abuse will not be taken into account in this study, nor will the
scope of the study extend itself to how the media representations of verbal abuse

6
psychologically impacts the victims or the media users. The study focuses solely on how the
media represents verbal abuse stories and will not contribute to determining ways on how to
cope with the impact on the mental health of the victims of verbal abuse.

The research on the media representations of verbal abuse and bullying is an important
social issue and the media exploration of such a social issue becomes significant so as to
understand how this issue is reported and communicated through the various media
platforms such as social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and
blogging sites like Vocal media. Social organisations and their blog posts have also been
included in the data sample. These include the blog posts of Domestic Violence Resource
Centre Victoria (2021), Health Direct Australia (2021) and White Ribbon Australia (2017).
Traditional newspaper data sources will be analysed. These include outlets such as the ABC
news (2017-2021), the SBS news (2017-2021), The Age (2021) , The Sydney Morning
Herald (2021). As we have seen above, this form of abuse also takes place in the media,
and therefore it is important to understand the reporting of verbal abuse in the media, the
storytelling of verbal abuse in the media, and also how different media platforms showcase
the issue of verbal abuse and bullying It, therefore, becomes extremely significant to explore
the different media sources and different media channels and their interpretation of verbal
abuse as well as the social media issue of “trolling”, which is a form of verbal abuse that
takes place through the very media, along with analyzing the way in which this issue is
communicated.

Thus, with the above-described concepts, the research study will first explore the academic
literature on the media representation of verbal abuse and the resulting impact of verbal
abuse. There will be an exploration and analysis of the academic sources and the research
questions will further be developed from the same.The data collection process would involve
collecting the relevant sources of literature and the existing content on social media
platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and
YouTube, along with blogging websites and the traditional media newspaper articles, which
will be used as secondary sources. The methodology will involve studying this data through
the method of Discourse analysis, which will lead to the results and a discussion of the
findings, including the research gaps, a comparison with the existing literature and the
significance of research findings as well as the unique findings of the research, which would
lead to the conclusions to be drawn from the research study.

7
 CHAPTER TWO: A REVIEW OF LITERATURE

1. STORYTELLING IN THE MEDIA

Simone Natalie (2016) in her study of storytelling and the narratives in her article “Unveiling
the Biographies of Media: On the Role of Narratives, Anecdotes, and Storytelling in the
Construction of New Media’s Histories'' describes Walter Benjamin’s theory of storytelling
and how storytelling creates a more open narrative that sticks in the memory of the reader
and integrates with the reader’s own experiences. According to Natalie (2016), the
biographies in the media are not just a reportage of events but rather repetitive and highly
standardized tales that cater to the reader’s interests for narrations and remain in their
memories. The storytelling facilitated by the media, in the domain of verbal abuse, which are
human narratives, mostly biographical in nature, are the focus of my research study and
Simone Natalie’s definition of storytelling that takes place through the media platforms, is
the object of my analysis in this research project. I aim to study how the stories about verbal
abuse are represented on the media platforms.
In Shamaila Dodhy’s 2017 case study of Yejide Kilanko’s book called Daughters Who Walk
This Path (2012), Dodhy analyses Kilanko’s experience of writing about a story of betrayal
trauma and its subsequent impact. Dodhy states a statement given by the author of the
book in an interview. Kilanko in 2016 stated that “My job guaranteed constant exposure to
heart-wrenching stories of sexual abuse and I struggled to fall and stay asleep . . . . Writing
the novel was therapeutic for me. I also hoped it would somehow help people who’ve
experienced sexual abuse accept that they’ve done nothing wrong.” Dodhy (Dodhy 2018 p
109) further describes the traditional media representation of abuse stories and literary
trauma and its connection to the concept of truth. She describes La Capra’s claims in 2014,
that state that fictional narratives may also involve truthful claims on a structural or on a
generic level by providing an insight into phenomena such as slavery and the holocaust, by
providing a possible “feel” for experience or emotion, which in contrast would be difficult to
arrive at, through the restricted documentary methods.
Dodhy (2017, p 103) states Vickroy’s (2002, p 3) analysis of the trauma texts and trauma
fiction. She states trauma literature is a contemporary genre that has narratives that use
elements like “gaps, uncertainties, dissociations and visceral details of living through
traumatic experiences as a way of immersing readers in the characters states of mind.”
Vickroy has also established methods of reading and understanding the states of minds of
characters in the varied pieces of literature on trauma stories and experiences (2017, p
103). This research study aims at studying the verbal abuse narratives of the victims, that
have been recorded in news reports and through the personal social media posts of the
victims themselves. Dodhy’s (2017) study suggests that the study of such personal stories
can provide insight into the phenomenon of the issues itself as they provide us with the
emotion of the experience, which otherwise would be restricted through the study of other
documentary methods.

Sara Monaci (2020) in her article called “Social Media Campaigns Against Violent
Extremism: A New Approach to Evaluating Video Storytelling,” studies storytelling through
8
social media campaigns against countering violent extremism. She discusses the approach
of storytelling on social media and how social network sites such as Facebook and YouTube
are an overwhelming field of experimentation among the youth, especially in terms of
communication, expressiveness, performance and socialization (Monaci 2020, p 986).
Monaci explores the concept of content spreadability which refers to the fundamental
dimension of social media storytelling, narrative virality, which is achieved by exploiting user
engagement and is referred to the kind of content that can turn out to be productive, and
initiate a positive process of circulation, sharing and re elaboration among the online
audiences. (Monaci 2020, p 986). Therefore, this concept can be studied in the context of
how social media storytelling fosters the spreadability of content by exploiting user
engagement. This concept can be related to the above two concepts as storytelling is done
in a manner that is influenced by the engagement of the meder user and audiences.

In another article called “Social Media as a Civic Mobilizer: Community Storytelling Network,
Social Media, and Civic Engagement in South Korea'' by Doo-Hun Choi, Seungahn Nah and
Deborah S. Chung (2021) also explores social media as a newly engaging storytelling agent
for communicating important information and to function as local storytelling agents and to
foster local community engagement. The findings of this particular study suggest how social
media is an emerging storytelling network that can play distinctive yet selective roles in
predicting civic engagement (Choi, Seungahn and Chung 2021). This approach is similar to
Monaci’s (2020) study of using social media storytelling as a means to foster engagement
and spreadability of a social issue or campaign. However, it differs from Dodhy’s (2017)
study of how storytelling and personal narratives are used to evoke emotional responses
from the readers and viewers. I aim to study how the concepts of storytelling are used in the
media to spread awareness against verbal abuse by social organisations in Australia.

2. SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS AND THE STORIES OF SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE

In the digital age, social media platforms, like Twitter, provide users with the opportunity to
anonymously share short narratives and functions as a connective medium where a large
community can share information and extend and exchange support ( Weathers,
Sanderson,
Neal and Gramlich 2016, p 60). In their 2016 study called, From Silence to
#WhyIStayed : Locating Our Stories and Finding Our Voices, Weathers, Sanderson, Neal
and Gramlich, conduct the first research on women using the social media platform of
Twitter to share their lived experiences with abusive relationships and their reasons for
staying. This study becomes relevant in the field of this study of the representation of verbal
abuse narratives on social media, as it too studies how abuse stories are shared on a
platform like Twitter, through the use of hashtags like #WhyIStayed, that became popular.
The results from the above literature, therefore, suggest the significance of the social media
platforms and their engagement, especially when they are used to publish stories about
socially significant topics such as domestic violence. The authors analyse the real social
media stories, posted by the domestic violence survivors, and the engagement that took
place, thereafter on social media (Weathers et al. 2011, p 60). The future research indicated
9
in this study is carried forward in my research on the verbal abuse representation in the
media as the voice of social media is explored in reference to a topic of social significance,
and indicates to a research study like mine, which aims at studying the representation of a
socially significant topic like verbal abuse and its media representation. The study adapted a
combination of methods to analyse the data, which consisted of Tweets on the social media
platform that had the mention of #WhyIStayed.Themes were recognised, summarized and
compared to identify the recurring themes. There was an interpretative nature of data
analysis and as an overlap between the categories existed, the authors concluded that
several themes could exist in one single posting about abuse (Weathers et al. 2011, p 62).
The results of the study were divided into the themes which included the reasons as to why
the women did not leave their abusive relationships. The study ends with stating how
significant social media is in the case of stigmatized issues such as domestic violence. The
authors suggest how the results of the study hold important implications for women as well
as the other important members of the society and of course, for the society as a whole and
these important implications include sharing experiences of stigmatised issues, such as
abusive relationships, on social media platforms, especially by women. (Weathers et al.
2011, p 65).

The study establishes the social media tools as an important force that cannot be ignored,
when social issues occur as they strategically connect the individuals with a plethora of
information and a platform like Twitter, provides a forum which can construct people’s social
realities surrounding abusive relationships (Weathers et al. 2011, p 65). The authors
suggest directions for future research at the end of the study. In the times of crisis, the study
suggests that it is significant to use the human element and the conversational human voice
and social media has now quickly become a space where the individual’s voice has the
potential to be heard and for their voices on powerful issues such as domestic violence, to
reach vast audiences, who otherwise could not be reached (Weathers et al. 2011, p 66).The
human element is used thoroughly by a social media platform like Twitter and it allows the
abused to share personal experiences and it gives others the ability to “live” these same
experiences (Weathers et al. 2011, p 66).

3.THE REPRESENTATION OF TROLLING IN THE MEDIA

As I aim to study the media representation of verbal abuse, it is interesting to explore how
the very platforms that narrate the stories of verbal abuse, also facilitate this verbal abuse, in
the form of trolling. Jonathan Bishop in the International Journal of Web based
communications, Vol.10,No.1, 2014, published a study called the “ Representations of ‘trolls’
in mass media communication : a review of media texts and moral panics related to ‘internet
trolling’.” where he studies, describes and defines the different forms of “trolling” that take
place on the internet and then conducts a deep analysis of the media texts and their
representations of these ‘trolls’.In his paper, Bishop (2014, p 7) discusses in detail the
history of trolling in the context of the mass media, especially the “classical trolling” and the
“anonymous trolling” which he goes on to discuss further, and then reviews the different
media headlines in newspapers, online or on television and how they use a variety of means
to convey their messages, in relation to the case of ‘trolls’. He also has mentioned directions
10
for future research. He suggests how the research, moving forward, should study in detail
the different character types of the internet troller and how these affect the way the so called
‘trolls’ are represented in the media and how this then affects the perception of the young
internet users and the trollers in general (2014, p 7).
Bishop (2014, p 7) describes internet trolling as being “one of the fastest spreading pieces of
computer jargon of the 21st century”. This new generation of digital natives have control
over their use of and production of media, which goes beyond the control that some
journalists may be comfortable with, therefore, the youth are presented at one point as the
perpetrators of abuse against others and the cause of a broken society (Bishop 2014, p 21).
In the 2017 article called “Under the bridge : An in-depth examination of online trolling in the
gaming context” in the International Communications Journal, there is an exploration of
different theories related to trolling and what motivated this behaviour. Like Bishop’s study,
there is an emphasis on the anonymity of the users, who engage in this behaviour and hide
behind screen names. Therefore, what is interesting to study in this research study would be
to explore how the very features of social media that represent stories of verbal abuse, also
facilitate trolling in the first place, through features like the anonymity that social media
provides to the trollers.

4. DIGITAL STORYTELLING ON THE MEDIA PLATFORMS

The concept of sentimentality in the media representations of digital storytelling is, therefore,
relevant in the analysis of digital storytelling that represent the stories of verbal abuse and
its impact. I aim at using the concept of sentimentality of digital storytelling and its affiliation
to evoking emotions, sympathy and nurturing, in analysing the data on the representation of
verbal abuse and its stories through the medium of digital storytelling. ‘Digital Storytelling
and the ‘problem’ of sentimentality’ (2017) is the name of the article by Kelly McWilliam and
Sharon Bickle, where they critically analyse the concept of digital storytelling and explore the
criticism of ‘sentimentality’ through the case study of an American programme called Stories
of Service, that facilitates the creation of the digital stories of war veterans. McWilliam and
Bickle (2017, p 77) begin their case study by defining what they mean by sentimentality in
digital storytelling. ‘Sentimentality’ is typically used to refer to the excessive, self indulgent
and banal use of affect to manipulate audiences into ‘tender’ emotional responses. It is the
common mode now that operates across all genres, forms and media. Calling digital
storytelling a ‘co-creative media practice’ , the authors mention how their study fills a
research gap as although digital storytelling has received scholarly attention as a
participatory media, its intersection with affect theory in general and sentimentality in
particular, have not yet received any scholarly attention (Mcwilliam and Bickle, 2017 p 77-
78).

The above concept becomes relevant for this research as in the exploration of how digital
storytelling tells the stories of verbal abuse, the concept of sentimentality is facilitated, in the
digital story representation. According to Mcwilliam and Bickle (2017, p 78) digital
storytelling is more specifically used to refer to the co-creative media practices in California
in the early

11
1990s in which ordinary people are taught to create short (2-5 minutes), typically
autobiographical ‘digital stories’ comprised in their simplest format of a voice over and
scanned, personal photographs. Sentimentality can be understood as an affective
realisation of digital storytelling as an emancipatory media opportunity for ‘ordinary’ people
to share and connect (Mcwilliam and Bickle 2017, p 87). The authors give the indication for
future research that arises in the research of the ideological tensions and the renewed
potential of digital storytelling. Sentimentality in the sphere of digital storytelling is based
upon the ‘the desire for bonding’ with its ‘affiliation on the plane of emotions, sympathy,
nurturance..for which sentimental writers and readers yearn’ as well as a political tool for
amplifying the intimate public. (Mcwilliam and Bickle 2017, p 87).

Derek Gladwin (2020) proposes how digital storytelling is an emerging media practice for
public education and gives examples of how the use of digital storytelling can make media
texts go viral and have a substantial impact on public discourse and it uses frameworks that
derive empathy and the rhetoric of empathy (Gladwin 2020, p 275). His article called “Digital
storytelling going viral : using narrative empathy to promote environmental action” (2020)
explores how digital storytelling and media texts can go viral, through the forms of
empathetic storytelling and that can have an impact on the experience of social action. It
explores how digital storytelling “mobilises environmental action across multimodal networks
of digital media through empathetic contagion” (Gladwin 2020, p 275). The concept of
evoking empathy through digital storytelling applied in this study, is similar to Mcwilliam and
Bickle (2017) concept of sentimentality in the sphere of digital storytelling, studied above,
and how it can be used to evoke emotions to amplify the intimate public.
I can, therefore, use this concept in the study of media representations of verbal abuse and
how and if verbal abuse stories are presented in a manner, through digital storytelling, that
mobilises action against the issue.

Another study by Jordan Morris (2019), called “Exploring the affordances of digital
storytelling in a media-arts restorative justice program” also suggests how digital storytelling
allows the participants to create a narrative discourse about their experiences, impact and
ways to improve and create an impact on their communities. This concept of creating an
impact for change through digital storytelling, is similar to the findings of the previous
literature and I aim at finding out how digital storytelling is used in the media in the sphere of
verbal abuse, to create an impact on how the media users view as well as take the steps to
tackle verbal abuse. Morris (2019, p 213) defines digital storytelling as stories being created
through a combination of computer based tools and also mentions how the distinguishing
feature of digital storytelling is its multimodality and defines multimodality as being the
combination of different semiotic modes, such as language and music. This feature of digital
storytelling has also been put forward in Gladwin’s (2020) study, where he studies how
environmental action has been mobilised through the multimodal networks of digital media.
These concepts of digital storytelling are found to be similar in the studies related to digital
storytelling and I aim at studying how verbal abuse is presented through the multimodal
networks of digital media.

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5. TRADITIONAL MEDIA AND THE REPRESENTATION OF ABUSE STORIES

Elena Maydell, in her 2017 study on the representation of child abuse in the print media of
New Zealand, states that mass media plays an important and influencial role in forming
public opinion. Her study investigated the coverage of serious child abuse between
November 2007 and November 2009, in three of the largest New Zealand newspapers.
According to Maydell (2017, p 707), in the area of communications and discourse studies, it
has long been established that the media has the persuasive power to construct and
dispense social knowledge. For an important issue to gain public awareness and attention, it
has to be first showcased as a social problem and this function is performed by the media
and the impact of the media in generating public awareness and attention on these issues,
cannot be underestimated (Maydell 2017, p 708). Maydell describes the tendency of the
media to represent various events by constructing the frames around the news stories which
includes “selecting and highlighting some facets of events or issues and making connections
among them so as to promote a particular interpretation, evaluation and or solution’. The
methodology adopted in this analysis of the abuse stories in the New Zealand newspapers,
through the method of critical discourse analysis. The analysis of this study look at the
media representations of the issue of child abuse and also the startegies that are used to
construct the identity of the main actors (as in the media coverage) and the relationships
between them. The author then further divides the two topics of severe physical abuse and
or death and sexual abuse and within each topic, identifies the two major categories that
produce the different representations of child abuse and discusses the findings, under these
two categories (Maydell, 2017 p 712-720)

The results first describe the quantitative nature of the representations in the newspapers (in
the form of categories). Maydell (2017, p 713-720) takes out parts from the newspaper
stories and analyses the framing and content of the stories in the different categories, in her
results and findings. The results of the study demonstrate that the main focus of the
newspaper coverage of the child abuse was on ‘crime reporting’. This is with respect to the
past research which suggests that the media is mostly interested in the sensationalist
features in news, especially criminal reporting, which drives them to choose individual or
episodic framing over societal or thematic framing. The research study concludes that the
dominant representation of child abuse in the New Zealand media is distorted in its view as
it is based on the sensationalist coverage of extreme but rare cases of abuse involving the
Maori children (Maydell 2017, pp 721-722). The indication of future research on the media
discourses of racism in relation to child abuse is proposed by the study (Maydell 2017 p
722). I aim to carry the indication of future research, which proposes the study of discourses
of racism in the media, by analysing how racial verbal abuse is represented in the media
texts.

RESEARCH GAP

After an extensive analysis of the existing literature, available in the English language on the
Monash Library Database of Communications and Media academic sources and on the
Google Scholar database, on the various themes of the media representation of verbal
13
abuse stories in the media, it can be established that this research study aims at filling a
research gap by conducting an analysis of the representation of verbal abuse and the
stories of the same, on the online media and then draw a comparison to the traditional
media platforms, from the year 2017-2021. After an exploration of the literature review, it
was discovered that the research gap that exists is the lack of an analysis of the media
representations of verbal abuse and how verbal abuse is represented on online and social
media through storytelling, digital storytelling, in news reports, and through the personal
narratives on social media.
Therefore, there is a research gap that this study will be filling, by exploring how the media,
through the different ways mentioned above, represents and communicates information on
verbal abuse.
CHAPTER THREE: METHODOLOGY

As I had begun my research study, I had introduced my topic of media representation of

verbal abuse with background research on the themes related to the media representation,
which led me to ask the following research questions -

1.How is verbal abuse represented in the new age of social media and by its media
users?

2.How does the online news and social media report verbal abuse and bullying
stories?

3. What is the difference between the traditional media representation of verbal abuse
and the new-age social media representation of the same?

In order to answer the above research questions, the data sample includes 40-42 media
texts and posts from social media platforms of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and blogging
websites such as Vocal media. The date range of the social media posts was set as January
2017-June 2021.Traditional media newspaper articles are included in the data sample from
media outlets such as the ABC news (2017-2021), the SBS news (2017-2021), The Age
(2021) , The Sydney Morning Herald (2021). The blog posts of social organizations of
Australia have also been taken into account. These include the Domestic Violence
Resource Centre Victoria (2021), Health Direct Australia (2021) and White Ribbon Australia
(2017). The secondary sources from 2014 from the Dailymail and the ABC news, about the
death of Charlotte Dawson, were also included, to support the study.
The methodological approach adopted by this study, to analyze the media data, from both
social and digital media as well as the traditional media platforms, is the method of
discourse analysis. The objective of analysing media data about the social phenomenon of
verbal abuse, along with the aspects of storytelling of this social phenomenon on the media
platforms and the different written, visual and audio ways in which it has been represented,
led to me choosing the most appropriate method of analysis for this study, which is the
method of discourse analysis of media texts. This method becomes appropriate for this

14
study because this study includes the study of news articles and social media posts, which
include texts and speech narratives.
Discourse analysis helps establish connections between media texts and meanings in
relation to social issues and the phenomena. The method has evolved from interpreting
language in texts to encompassing visual texts such as image and diagrams, videos, sound
effects, music and the other various interactive texts (Lemke 2012, p 1). Therefore, to
analyse the verbal abuse representations in the form of interviews, news stories, and on the
video-sharing platforms like YouTube, images and videos with text in captions on Instagram
and Facebook as well as analysing pure texts, along with one original image, in the form of
storytelling in blogs, the sample of analysis includes texts, visual and audio. Therefore,
discourse analysis has been chosen as the method to analyse the data and derive results.
The data sample also consists of the traditional media representations of verbal abuse
which are newspaper articles. An interesting sample of data that has been collected in the
collection of news articles that have been published digitally on the websites and news
applications of legacy broadcasting media channels like ABC news, the SBS news, The
Age, The Sydney Morning Herald. The social media posts and other digital posts were
collected from platforms that are global platforms and don’t have a filter or way to determine
the country or origin of from where the post is made. However, the blog posts of the social
organisations were of the Australian social organizations as well as the traditional media
news articles were collected from Australian media outlets. The websites of social
organisations are Domestic Violence Resource Centre Victoria (2021), Health Direct
Australia (2021) and White Ribbon Australia (2017). Traditional newspaper data sources
include outlets such as the ABC news (2017-2021), the SBS news (2017-2021), The Age
(2021) , The Sydney Morning Herald (2021).

HOW WAS THE DATA COLLECTED?

As the literature review divided the types of media representations based on the form of
representation, the data was also subsequently collected based on the different types of
media platforms, as described in the themes of the literature that was studied. The search
terms on all of the media platforms remained the same. The search terms were :-

1. verbal abuse
2. verbal abuse stories
3. verbal abuse survivors
5. bullying
6. verbal abuse and social organisations

1. SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS

The search was conducted on social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter,
YouTube, and the blogging and storytelling in the form of written texts and pictures platform,
called Vocalmedia. I chose Vocalmedia as a platform to be included in my sample as it
displayed personal narratives of victims of verbal abuse, written in the form of essays and
poems. Three other blog posts were found on verbal abuse and verbal abuse survivors by
social organisations in Australia.
15
The blog posts were found on the websites of Whiteribbon Australia, The Domestic Violence
Resource Center Australia, and The Health Direct Australia. These were found through a
Google search engine result on the Australian blog posts about verbal abuse, verbal abuse
survivors, and bullying in Australia, from the year January 2017 to the data published till
June 2021.
On Instagram and Twitter, the data was filtered by searching for hashtags (that would
produce results of posts having these words in them). These include :-
#verbalabuse,#verbalabusestories,#bullying,#bullyinginaustralia, and
#verbalabusesurvivors.
On Facebook, YouTube, Vocal, the data was filtered by the search results of the words
“verbal abuse” “verbal abuse stories” and “verbal abuse survivors” “abuse”, which led to the
data that included a Facebook group and real-life autobiographical stories, news stories and
videos of the victims of verbal abuse, posted on all of these media platforms respectively.
The search filters of the respective location and time (January 2017- June 2021) were
applied on all of the search engines of the respective platforms.

2. TRADITIONAL MEDIA PLATFORMS

The traditional media data was collected in a variety of different ways. A google search was
made on the Australian newspaper articles, television, and films on ‘verbal abuse in
Australia’ ‘abuse stories’ and ‘verbal abuse and bullying survivors in Australia’ with filters on
the time (2017-2021). The most appropriate traditional media data was then selected,
regarding the relevant theme of verbal abuse and its impact stories.
A total of 18 newspaper articles from the leading Australian newspaper dailies have been
chosen as a part of the data.
The newspaper articles were searched for through the newspaper bank search on Google,
and a similar set of terms, such as verbal abuse, verbal abuse stories, verbal abuse, verbal
abuse survivors, bullying and verbal abuse and social organisations,were used for the
search.

3. Digital News Stories

Legacy Australian media outlets such as the ABC news, SBS news, THE AGE, The Sydney
Morning Herald now post digital news stories on their websites and mobile applications.
Data was collected from these media platforms by using the search engines on the websites
and applications of ABC news (2017-2021), the SBS news (2017-2021), THE AGE (2021) ,
The Sydney Morning Herald (2021). The terms used in all of the above portals remained the
same.

DISCOURSE ANALYSIS AND THE DATA COLLECTED

As the data that has been collected can be divided into categories of images, videos, audio,
and text as well as a combination of these categories, the method of discourse analysis will
be applied to find meanings represented by these categories of data. A total of 40-42 media
sources have been selected as a part of the data sample. These include 18 newspaper

16
articles. The social media posts are two Facebook posts, two Instagram posts, two Twitter
posts, eight YouTube posts, six Vocalmedia blog posts. Three blog posts from social
organisations in Australia have also been included in the data sample.

Language can be used to not just communicate information, but to extract meaning and
information from sources as well (Paul Gee 2005, p 15). Discourse analysis involves a more
thorough understanding and meaning assigned to the words of others and language here
carries out two interrelated functions such as supporting the performance of social activities,
social identities and to support human affiliation within social groups and institutions (Paul
Gee 2005, p 14). In this research study, language in the group social media posts and blogs
and the audio in videos by media users sharing their experiences with verbal abuse plays
the function of performing the social activities of storytelling and support the function of a
sense of belonging within the community and groups on social networking sites, by the
method of sharing information through language (Paul Gee 2005, pp 14-15).

According to James Paul Gee (2005, p 27) the key to discourse is “recognition.” It is
important to put language, action, interaction, values, belief, symbols, objects, tools, and
places so that the identity (a particular type of who) engaged in a particular type of activity
(what) becomes recognisable. In order to be a “discourse”, whatever has been done must
be similar enough to other performances to be recognizable and if it is different enough but
can still be recognised, it can change and transform discourses. If it is not recognisable at
all, then it is not in the discourse (Paul Gee 2005, p 27). Therefore, this research study
analyses the discourse, that recognises the language, action, who was represented how, in
social media posts and in news articles about verbal abuse and bullying. The study aims at
recognising the patterns, similarities and differences through the discourse analysis of the
media texts of verbal abuse.
The discourse of the media data implies the analysis of the language and other actions and
interactions and the recognition of the identity and activity of the media user. This will be
done by analysing the data in reference to the media theories and the previous literature
established by media researchers. The data will be given context through the media theories
and the previous research done on media users and media representations. I will be doing
this by dividing my data sources into different themes which are based on the type of data
and will be looking at them together under these themes and categories. I have divided my
data into six themes, depending on the type of data.

LIMITATIONS OF STUDY

This research study has certain limitations in its scope. There is a limitation to the data
collection as only the data that had the particular set of terms were filtered in the data
collection. Certain media representations of verbal abuse and its stories on social media and
traditional media that may not contain any of the terms related to verbal abuse, have not
been covered in this research. This research study is limited to the media of the Australian
region alone and covers the media stories from January 2017 to June 2021. I have included
global media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram. Therefore, it is
not possible to filter out the location on these global media platforms and limit them to the

17
posts made from the Australian region alone. However, I have tried, to the best of my ability,
to select Australian news media texts. This was not possible on the global social media
platforms. However, the region filter has been applied to the social media search engines,
wherever possible. The methodology of discourse analysis is limited by its interpretative
nature. There is a gap that exists between the addresser’s meaning and the addressee’s
interpretation of this meaning, as a result of the addressee’s knowledge and beliefs and the
researcher chooses to abstract contexts from sentences and examples that are only
relevant to the ongoing research and that does not produce a strict analysis (Tenorio 2011,
p 195). Therefore, the analysis done by me would solely be based on my interpretation of
the media texts and the evidence I use to support my claims. This is a limitation to study as
the claims will be based solely on my understanding of the media texts and my interpretation
of the same.
The media data is limited by one method of analysis, which is based on the extraction of
meaning by relating it to the knowledge and the theoretical framework provided by the
selected literature on the different types of media representations. This might act as a
limitation to research as the vast data is interpreted using one method of analysis and its
meaning is supported by limited literature.
A limitation also arises on the way the selection of the data has been made. A set of
keywords were used to search media sources on social media platforms and on Google.
Therefore, this study is limited to a sample of data from January 2017-June 2021 and that is
sourced on four social media platforms and on Google. The data has also been collected
only from English language sources. Another limitation to this research is that a limited
number of media platforms have been selected as a part of the data, because of time
constraints. I will not be engaging in finding out the psychological impact or the mental
health effects on the victims, after they make use of the different media platforms to share
their verbal abuse stories or the effects on media users of facing verbal abuse online. The
study is limited to the analysis of how the media represents verbal abuse and how the verbal
abuse takes place via the media.

18
 CHAPTER 4 : RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

I began my research with asking questions that would include finding out how verbal abuse
and bullying were represented on social media and the way in which it was expressed on
the various media platforms, by the media users. The second question led me to ask how
the stories of verbal abuse were reported by media professionals. I also proposed to draw a
comparison between the traditional media representation of the issue of verbal abuse, with
the representation on the new age digital media. After a thorough analysis of the data
collected from different media platforms, which included platforms such as social networking
sites, personal blogs as well as the websites and blogs of social organizations. The
traditional media data was collected from the digital media platforms of traditional media
outlets such as the ABC news (2017-2021), the SBS news (2017-2021), The Age (2021) ,
The Sydney Morning Herald (2021). The articles that were analysed, were published
digitally on the news applications and websites of these media houses. Lastly, news story
sources of the suicide of model Charlotte Dawson in 2014, such as the article “Charlotte
Dawson's death puts cyberbullying back in spotlight” (ABC News 2014) and an article from
the Dailymail (2014) were also studied as secondary sources, to further establish the
importance of the media representation of verbal abuse and the verbal abuse that takes
place in the form of online exploitation.

After the analysis of a total forty sources from various platforms of media, both digital as well
as the traditional media, the manner in which verbal abuse and bullying have been
represented in the media, can be summarised. The media data sources were collected from
the date range of January 2017 - June 2021.
I intend to study this in this paper, by dividing the data into several themes that describe the
various ways in which verbal abuse has been broadcasted and written, through the various
media tools and channels. A major difference between the media representation of verbal
abuse and its impact that emerges is that of the difference between reported media stories
and stories that have been narrated by the verbal abuse victims and survivors themselves.
The social media posts, on different platforms, have both reported as well as the personal
narrations of verbal abuse survivors and their stories. The social media posts outnumber
traditional media posts, when it comes to personal narratives of verbal abuse survivors in
the media. The traditional media representation of verbal abuse stories of victims had
personal narratives in the form of interviews, by reporters. Therefore, the way in which
verbal abuse and its impact has been represented differs between the social media posts
and the traditional media reported news articles. This has been further discussed in the
themes below.

The issue of verbal abuse is broadcast, written and shown in the media in a number of
different ways, but more importantly, the differentiation between the representation of verbal
abuse in the media can be made on the basis of which aspect of this issue is showcased.
The aspects are of different themes and categories and the results of the data have been
analysed on the basis of these different themes and categories of representation. I have
chosen different types of themes, in order to study how verbal abuse is represented through
news reports, through the personal narratives of the victims themselves, through posts by
19
Social organisations in Australia, how verbal abuse that takes place in different social
settings or because of social reasons takes place. I have also explored the theme of online
bullying and trolling as well as drawing a contrast of the online media representation with the
traditional media representation of verbal abuse.

The results and the discussion have been divided into the following themes
and categories :-

1) Reported stories in the media of verbal abuse.

2) Personal narratives of verbal abuse and bullying on social media.

3) Social organisations and their digital media representation of verbal abuse.

4) Verbal abuse in different social settings and its media representation 5)

‘Trolling’ on the media platforms.

6) How is the traditional media representation of verbal abuse different from the
social media representation of verbal abuse

Social organisations such as the Domestic Violence Resource Centre Victoria (2021),
Health Direct Victoria (2021) and White Ribbon Australia (2017), have narrated stories on
verbal abuse and its impact, especially on how to deal with it, what to do to tackle verbal
abuse and its impact, along with steps on how to get support in Australia if you are victim of
verbal abuse and bullying. The blogs adapt both a manner of storytelling, in which they use
narrations from verbal abuse survivors, along with information on the plans and policies
available for Australians, in order to help combat verbal abuse and to help the victims of
verbal abuse (Domestic Violence Resource Centre Victoria 2021).
YouTube is another platform where social awareness videos on verbal abuse and its impact
have been represented. The platform of YouTube has been used to report stories on verbal
abuse by media channels as well as to share videos, in a storytelling format, to raise
awareness on how to tackle verbal abuse and how to reach out for the appropriate help
against verbal abuse in Australia (NSW Department Of Education 2017)

Storytelling emerges as a popular medium on social media platforms to showcase verbal

abuse and its impact. Social media has been used by media users to narrate their
experiences of verbal abuse and bullying. This has been done in the form of brief narrations
through Facebook and Twitter posts as well as long narrations written on blogging sites.
This study has taken data from Vocal media - a blogging portal, where media users have
described their experiences of verbal abuse and its impact, in the form of poems, essays
and images. Vocal media is a website that enables users to create stories and share their
work and to build an audience. It also lets the viewers pay the author or creator, if they like
their stories, in the form of ‘tips’. For Instance, a user by the username of

20
‘Jennerallyspeaking’, writes an essay in 2018, on the blog, called “Verbal, Mental, Physical”
where she narrates her experience with verbal abuse and bullying but also how she fought
back and urges other victims to do the same (JennerallySpeaking 2018). She writes , “In my
case of abuse, I fight back every time, use my tongue like a sword trying not to abuse but to
elicit emotions and identify what the other person is doing to me” (Jennerallyspeaking 2018,
para 4).
Instagram has been used by media users to showcase images that tell their stories of verbal
abuse experiences. The caption, which is the text displayed below the image of the user,
narrates brief information about the image. YouTube has been used to showcase verbal
abuse through videos, which narrate the story of the experiences of verbal abuse and its
impact. For example, in an Instagram post by a user with the username of
“cassowary_photographics,” the user posts an image of herself, with dark make-up and a
frightened expression. She explains the image in the caption by raising a voice against
cyberbullying and how harmful it is (cassowary_photographics 2020).

Verbal abuse takes place in different social settings and because of different social reasons
such as workplace bullying and racial verbal abuse. Therefore, another theme that emerges
is the representation of verbal abuse and bullying experiences that take place in different
settings and to analyse them on the basis of the theme of where and how they are taking
place, they have been divided into workplace bullying and racial verbal abuse.
Verbal abuse is represented through different themes and ways on social media, but these
very platforms of social media also indulge in facilitating verbal abuse and bullying. This
study analyses secondary media sources that describe online verbal abuse and trolling. The
term “trolling” is now the name given widely by the media to describe the posting of
offensive messages by an individual or group of people, in addition to the other hate
campaigns organised by groups. Trolling is all kinds of negatively marked online behaviours
(Lumsden and Morgan 2017, p 929). Social media platforms and their design and the
anonymity that they offer their users, provide power to these “trolls”(Lumsden and Morgan
2017, p 936). Therefore, it is important to analyse data that represents the way trolling is
facilitated by the different social media platforms. The secondary sources that have been
selected for the analysis include reported news articles and a news story video on online
bullying and verbal abuse, especially the popular media reports on the trolling of the
Australian model, Charlotte Dawson and her eventual suicide attributed to online celebrity
trolling (Webb 2014). I chose secondary sources to study the online verbal abuse
phenomena of trolling, in order to study the media framing of trolling as the media coverage
can promote and encourage abuse as well as media frames can influence and shape public
understanding and public policy (Lumsden and Morgan 2017, pp 929 - 936)

Lastly, I have analysed traditional media data and the way it has represented verbal abuse
and have drawn a comparison with the social media representation of the same. The
traditional media data includes primary sources which are in the form of news reports and
articles that have been published on the digital websites of media platforms. These include
ABC news, SBS news, The Guardian, Sydney Morning Herald and The AGE. These media
channels represent the traditional way of media representations and are considered
differently from the social media representations of the same. I have discussed the results of
21
the above described themes with the use of the methodology of discourse analysis. The
language and the way the language has been used, have been studied, along with deriving
meaning from what has been said and written, on the different media platforms, to answer
the respective research questions.

THEME 1. REPORTED STORIES OF VERBAL ABUSE IN THE MEDIA

In five of the reported news stories of verbal abuse, the interviews that state the personal
experience and emotional reaction of the victim have been highlighted and presented first.
The five news reports studied include two articles published by SBS news on 1st August
2017 and on the 4th March 2021, an article published by ABC news on 16th February 2018
and two YouTube news stories uploaded by TheFeedSbs on April 29th, 2019 and by
60minutes Australia on January 18th 2021, respectively.

In the SBS news article, “How to stand up to online bullies” (Morton 2017), the experience
of online bullying of Philippa Moore has been written about in a manner that emphasizes her
experience and reaction to online verbal abuse. The article begins with a quote by the victim
which focuses on her emotional reaction to the online hate and abuse. “I felt like I'd had the
rug pulled out from under me,” Moore recalls, thinking back to 2007 when the bullying first
started. “Everything felt numb, like it was a bad joke or a dream. I felt so deceived. And I
was so frightened.” (Morton 2017, para 1). The article begins with the story of the victim and
by telling the reader of the victim’s autobiographical book and her recollection of what
happened to her mental health because of the verbal abuse that she faced (Moore 2017).
Similarly, in the SBS news article (2021), that covers what has been happening to Asians in
Australia since the onset of COVID-19, is also a reported news article about what Asians in
Australia have been facing as well as a narration by Mark Yin, who is Asian Australian, who
has faced racial verbal abuse in Australia. This story includes narrations of the victims as
well, including commentary by the reporter Mark, who is a victim himself. The quotes from
victims in this article also narrate how the victim felt after he or she heard the offensive
verbal comments. “I was upset because they assumed I was Chinese, but also because I
have to feel afraid all the time when I’m in public alone,” (Yin 2021, para 8) is the first quote
that is mentioned in the article. The emotional reaction of the victim is given prominence in
the reported media stories.

When people read or hear news, they often want to know how it is relatable and related to
their own community. Proximity and Sensationalism are two factors that determine news and
sensationalism is a factor that involves news which features violence, scandals and drama
which is familiar and relevant (Kononova et al 2009). Therefore, news reports use interviews
of victims that highlight their intense emotional reactions to verbal abuse and the impact on
them and this enhances the newsworthiness of the media item.

In the ABC news article “Facebook’s dark side : Bullying defamation and death threats in
your local community group”, the news report begins with three terms which are “death
threats, verbal abuse, and trolling ...” (ABC news 2018, para 1). These terms are stated as
being related directly to social media and the use of it and how this comes as obvious terms
for the Facebook local community group and their admins. The emotional reaction of the
22
victims (admins) has been highlighted, in bold, in the article. “The abuse has been very cruel
and cuts deep” (ABC news 2018, para 4), quotes the article and the use of seemingly
“sensational” words that represent the emotional reaction of the victims have been used
throughout the article, especially at the beginning.

In the YouTube news story on workplace bullying by TheFeedSBS (2019), the video has
interviews from Australian workers, wherein they recall in detail, their horrific experiences of
workplace verbal abuse. Similarly, in the YouTube video called “Chole’s Law” by 60 minutes
Australia (2021), the video is a news story which covers the suicide of a victim of verbal
abuse and bullying and the video focuses on the victim’s sister’s interview and her initiative
against verbal abuse. The media representations of verbal abuse are reported in a manner
which can evoke an emotional and psychological reaction in the viewer or reader.
Sensational news contains elements that can arouse the reader or the viewer’s empathy
and emotions (Uribe and Gunter 2007, p 209) and the elements in the reported news stories
are the first hand interviews of the victims of verbal abuse, with an emphasis on their
emotional reaction to verbal abuse and bullying.

Therefore, I can state that the reported media stories of verbal abuse and its impact
are represented in a sensational manner to increase the newsworthiness of the news
story and evoke an emotional response from the media viewer or reader. The above
analysis contributes to answering the research question of how verbal abuse is
reported in the media.

THEME 2. PERSONAL NARRATIVES OF VERBAL ABUSE AND BULLYING ON SOCIAL

MEDIA

Social media has been used by users to publish posts, using the affordances and features of
that particular platform, in order to share their personal experiences of verbal abuse. I
studied eight posts, from the date range of 2018 - 2021, on the social media platforms of
Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Vocal.media and YouTube, made by the victims of verbal
abuse and bullying, in the form of written texts, images and videos. Facebook posts included
written texts of up to 200 words, Instagram posts include pictures and two-three lines of
written text, which are used as the caption of the pictures, Twitter posts are brief written
experiences of bullying that lead to the users standing up against bullying, Vocal media is a
blogging site which has media users post their personal experiences of verbal abuse in the
form of essays and poems and lastly YouTube has a spoken monologue in an uploaded
video, where the victim narrates her story of racial verbal abuse over the years along with
emphasizing on the power of storytelling to “break down barriers” (Ahmadzai 2021). In the
social media posts of verbal abuse, where personal experiences have been shared by the
victims, a common observation is made, which is how storytelling is used to recall the
experience of verbal abuse and how that leads to the victims mostly stating how that
experience shapes them today and urging others to become aware of the phenomena of
verbal abuse and bullying. Marrwah Ahmadzai (Ahmadzai 2021) speaks about her story of
facing racial verbal abuse as she wore a hijab to school and then at work as a doctor in
Australia. After narrating her story with anecdotes, she urges the audience and the viewers

23
to become aware and share stories to break these barriers that lead to racial verbal abuse
(Ahmadzai 2021). Similarly, in the Instagram posts by cassiewary_photographs (2020), the
user uploads an image in which she is crying and wearing dark makeup. The caption raises
awareness against how horrible cyber bullying is and how to fight it. Another Instagram user,
posts a before and an after image of herself, where she shows her weight loss. The caption
recalls and calls out her body shamers and she then urges how she would never let anyone
bully her or her children again and will stand up to verbal abuse (milfie_11official 2021).
Abuse victims have shared the desire to share their stories and experiences in order to
reveal the complexity of abuse to others and also to prevent others from experiencing the
same pain (R Linabary and Corple 2018, p 1835).

Young people utilise the digital media to find support, explore their identities and manage
boundaries (Hanckel Vivienne et al 2019, p 1).

The Facebook posts represent a different type of a personal narrative. The posts on
Facebook state briefly what the victim has or is going through and the users then ask the
Facebook group members on how to combat the effects of bullying or how to stop it. “I was
bullied at home, at the bus stop, on the bus (driver and kids), at school (teachers, admin,
kids), Sunday school, neighborhood. Every single day! I have physically-abusive teacher
stories! Ugh. First “love”, bosses, coworkers. I’m so tired, y’all” (Deni Liketherestaurant
2021) is what one Facebook user posts. Another simply posts “I am getting bullied and I
need help” (Amir Khan 2021). An observation can be made here on how personal narratives
on social media can lead to media users asking for help from others by telling their stories.
The Facebook feature of posting comments under posts, allows other users to actually give
their opinion on how to combat the verbal abuse and fight against this. Therefore, personal
narratives of verbal abuse on social media also lead to a form of interaction, wherein
other media users provide their opinions and experiences in the form of comments.

The poems and essays published on Vocal.media reveal the personal experiences of verbal
abuse of the victims in a creative manner. The blog posts on Vocal.media describe personal
narratives of verbal abuse and bullying, along with artistic images and metaphorical titles.
The narrative essay is titled “Almost Girl” (2021) written by a victim of verbal abuse, sharing
her experience of repeatedly getting verbally and physically abused through her childhood
and how that led to her describing herself as an “almost” being, where life for her seems to
always be stuck at an “almost”. She has used this metaphor to describe the impact on her
life from being a victim of repeated verbal and physical abuse. The image she has drawn
along with her essay represents cartoon sketches of a girl’s body broken into several pieces
(sincerely mickie 2021). An interesting image she has posted is the sketch of a girl and her
head in turmoil.The image represents the effect on the mental well-being of the girl, after
facing repeated verbal abuse (sincerely mickie 2021). The personal narratives on blogging
sites use poetic and creative storytelling, to share the experiences of verbal abuse and its
impact. Similarly, in the poems published on Vocal.media, the media users have displayed
their emotional experiences through the use of metaphors. Shannon Slabaugh (2021) writes
about her experience in her poem called ‘Bullies.” “I feel trapped,” “I feel like I can’t breathe”
(Slabaugh 2021, para 2), is how she poetically describes her experience of being bullied

24
and uses poetry and creative storytelling to recite her experience of verbal abuse. In another
poem, which has the same title, the poet Andy Gray (2021), pens down his experience in a
poem, which has a rhyme scheme and is a creative narrative. “Hey mr bully what have I
done, Why is bullying me so much fun?, (Gray 2021, para 3), writes the victim in his poetic
narrative. Storytelling is that different human faculty that can be described as “poetic
wisdom.” It is human capacity and tendency to deal with the world and make sense of it
through the use of creative metaphors, not always directly but by the means of other
agencies, not literally but poetically (Land 1995, p 54).
Similarly, Darcy Alexandra, in his study of digital storytelling in 2008, supports this
observation. According to him, digital storytelling offers the marginalised or often silenced
groups of people, the process of engaging in creative self expression, collaboration and
dialogue around issues and situations that are often silenced and ignored. The digital
narratives make the voice of the storyteller the centre and use creative movements, still
images along with the spoken word (Alexandra 2008, p 1). Therefore, it can be argued
that personal narratives of verbal abuse and its impact, through storytelling on social
media, adapt a creative and poetic mode of self expression.
This argument answers the additional question that arises here, which is what is the
difference and similarities between reported media stories of verbal abuse and the
personal narratives of the same ?

There emerges a contrasting depiction and representation of verbal abuse and its impact in
reported stories and in personal narratives. Reported stories adapt to sensational news
reporting, which in journalistic writing, increases the newsworthiness of the story and
increases the number of readers and viewers (Urbie and Gunter 2007).
In contrast, the personal narratives of verbal abuse and its impact in the media are
represented in a manner which increases engagement with other users. This can be seen
through social media posts such as Twitter posts and Facebook posts, in which the victims
narrate their experiences and also ask questions to the users. For instance, a facebook
post, with a green background simply states “ I got bullied, I am very stressed” (Amir Khan
2021).
This has been simply posted by a user, but it has been posted in a group for verbal abuse
victims. A reply to the post in the comments is “You need to stand up for yourself... Dont let
them do that to you... You are not born to be bullied your a fighters since you are a child you
are not a survivor you are a warrior.. dont let them do that to you.. stand and speak... Let
them know how you feel” (Cortez 2021). Therefore, the comments that followed are of
importance as they are of help and encouragement and users post that they also went
through something similar but have emerged victorious. Such posts, where the victims
narrate what has happened to them and its impact on them, generate engagement and
support from other users.
What is similar in the representation of verbal abuse and its impact in reported stories and in
personal narratives would be the mention of the emotional reactions of the victims. This is
done in the form of hard-hitting interviews in the reported stories, whereas this is done in the
form of creative personal reflections on social media. For example, in the blog post by
Vocal.media, Andy Gray (2021), writes in his poem, “To stay strong I try with all my might,

25
Here starts another day and another long fight.” He uses poetry to describe his experience
with bullies and bullying and in a poetic reflection, describes his reaction as well as calls out
the bullies and asks them to “build people up, instead of pulling them down” (Gray 2021).
The above discussion on the reported news articles and personal narratives also proves my
thesis statement of how first-person storytelling has been used more in revealing the truth
about victim abuse than mainstream media reporting.

THEME 3. SOCIAL ORGANISATIONS AND THEIR DIGITAL MEDIA

REPRESENTATIONS OF VERBAL ABUSE

Several social organisations and initiatives in Australia have focused and used media
platforms to represent verbal abuse, bullying and how to deal with these social issues. The
digital media representations of verbal abuse by social organisations that have been studied
include Youtube videos and blog posts on the official websites of these organisations. A
total of 6 posts, which include three blog posts and three YouTube videos, have been
analysed below. The blog posts were selected by typing in keywords such as “social
organisations and verbal abuse” on a search on google and were selected from the time
range of 2017 till June
2021. Blog posts from organisations such as Domestic Violence Resource Centre Victoria
(2021), Health Direct Australia (2021) and White Ribbon Australia (2017) have been
analysed, along with videos shared by the NSW department of education (2017), Worksafe
Victoria (2018) and YouTube video by White Ribbon Australia (2020). The overall motive of
all the media posts by the social organisations lies in raising awareness on verbal abuse
and bullying and to let the victims know that they are not alone in experiencing these issues
as well as listing down ways of how to combat this. The ways and approach of media
representation, however, differs between the organisations and medium.
The Domestic Violence Resource Centre Victoria (2021), writes a blog, with the title, “Stories
from women about abusive relationships” that records stories of women who have faced
abusive relationships. The post features an entire chain of quotes by women who have been
subjected to abusive relationships, ending with a dialogue box that lists several types of
support services available in Victoria for anyone facing abuse. The detailed stories of abuse
of the same women and others are available in a dialogue box on the side. The categories
have been divided into different social groups and their stories such as stories from women
in lesbian relationships, stories from women with disabilities, stories from men and stories
from young men (Domestic Violence Resource Centre 2021). The blog posts by Health
Direct Australia (2021) and WhiteRibbon Australia (2017) follow a similar template and
theme. The posts begin by describing what is emotional abuse and what it means to be in
abusive relationships respectively. WhiteRibbon Australia (2017) focuses on gender based
violence and violence against women and the common reasons for a larger number of
women being abused than men. The posts describe and provide evidence on what it means
to be emotionally and verbally abused. The post by Health Direct Australia (2021) describes
the ways to get help against abuse in Australia in a separate dialogue box, whereas the post
by WhiteRibbon Australia (2017, para 1) begins its narrative by focusing on the National
Plan to reduce violence against women and educating the readers on the same. The post

26
then goes on to describe violence against women, the evidence for it and what enables this
violence against women.
The blog posts use very simple language, sources and references to support the evidence
that they provide. Social organisations aim at raising awareness and educating media users
on what it means to be abused and what can be done to overcome the impact and seek
help against being abused and they do so by providing evidence and sources. The language
is precise and direct and the framing of the messages adapts a method of actively providing
information and help to the reader. This becomes significant as media users of all ages and
backgrounds become aware of what they can do and the steps they can actively take in
order to combat the verbal abuse or bullying that they might be being made a victim of.
Rhetorical framing in the media seeks to influence our personal and collective behaviours by
having us voluntarily agree with the communicator that a certain value, action or policy is
better than the other (Pietracatella and Brady 2016, p 59). Social organisations and media
representations of verbal abuse adapt the concept of rhetorical framing, wherein they try to
use simple language, which influences the reader to adapt to the policy and steps being
suggested to combat verbal abuse. Frames diagnose, evaluate, prescribe and predict
outcomes for an issue or subject under discussion.

Therefore, the concept of media framing, and rhetorical framing, by social

organizations is used in order to describe, evaluate and predict outcomes and
solutions, for the social issue of verbal abuse and its impact (Pietracatella and Brady
2016, p 59).

The video representations of verbal abuse by social organisations also adopt a simple, clear
and concise use of imparting information. The overall theme is similar to the blog posts, as
the videos narrate information and educate the audience on what it means to be verbally
abused and bullied in different situations, like school or the workplace and what the victims
can do to seek help. However, what is different in the videos, is the use of creative and
situational visuals and storytelling. The video, titled, “You’re Wonderful” by the NSW
department of education in 2017, creates a video in which children speak the words used to
verbally abuse and how they turn those words around into positive words of compliments
and appreciation. Similarly, the video by WorkSafe Victoria (2018) , uses animated actors to
describe the situation of bullying at the workplace and how the workers in Victoria can take
the appropriate action against workplace bullying and harassment. The framing of
messages is similar to that of blog posts, as the intention of the media representation
remains the same. However, the video representations adapt a creative and more
engaging form of communication, with providing situations as examples and actors
performing those situations.

THEME 5. VERBAL ABUSE IN DIFFERENT SOCIAL SETTINGS AND ITS MEDIA

REPRESENTATION

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 1. Verbal abuse and bullying at the workplace

A total of six of the primary media data sources, report or narrate the story with the theme of
verbal abuse and bullying, at the workplace of the victim. “Swearing, spitting and death
threats are among the abuses reported by the workers” reports the article by ABC news,
titled “Canberrans urged to check their behaviour towards retail, hospitality staff as 90 per
cent report abuse at work” written by Nikki Burnside on 29th November, 2018. The report
begins by describing the experience of Catherine Hooper, a retail worker, who describes her
experience of verbal abuse and how it destroys her Christmas and how it was tough to talk
about this situation and as she works with young people, she sees them crying on the floor
at work. She questions how people just call this a “part of the job” and why was this taking
place in the first place (Burnside 2018, para 5-6). The emphasis on the human interest in
this reported article, along with the use of the emotional reactions of the victim, is similar to
the analysis I made of the way verbal abuse is reported in news stories. Humans have a
passion for knowing what other people are doing and have the capacity to be sympathetic
for those who have suffered (Lamble 2016, p 39). Human interest stories tend to be focused
on emotions and provoking the emotional reactions (Lamble 2016, p 39) and the stories in
the media regarding verbal abuse at the workplace focus on the behaviour of the people
towards workers, who are trying to do their best and the subsequent effects of the bullying
on the workers. The way Catherine describes how working in retail during Christmas has
made her lose out on the joy of a holiday that she actually enjoys, has been mentioned at
the beginning of the article and instantly grabs the reader’s attention and emotional reaction
(Burnside 2018, para 1).

The news media representation of verbal abuse and bullying at the workplace follows the
pattern of using words that grab the reader's attention. In another article in The Age (Ilanbey
2021) called “ ‘Misogynists, egoistical bullies’ revealed in aviation firefighting review”, the
words used in the headline itself are of interest as they represent people in authority who
are being harmful and abusive. The words are harsh and hard-hitting and instantly evoke an
attack on people, which is similar to representation presented by the article by ABC news.
There was coverage on the workplace harassment of teachers in schools that came forward
in 2019. “Almost every Australian teacher has been bullied by students or their parents, and
it’s taking a toll” is the title of a report, published on the news website called The
Conversation (Billett, Burns and Fogelgarn 2019). Billett et al. (2018) conducted a study to
find out the recent data on the bullying and harassment of teachers in Australia, the impact
of the same on the teachers and concluded the study with stating the steps that can be
taken to prevent the bullying of teachers (Billett Burns and Fogelgarn 2019). The article also
states some information from teachers on the impact of the verbal abuse along with the
policies they wish to see being implemented to stop the verbal abuse against teachers. A
YouTube video by 9news also describes the situation of parents bullying teachers in Perth.
The video reports on the abusive messages and threats by parents, received by the
teachers and also posting offensive comments on social media as well as showing up to the
school to threaten them (9news Perth 2019). The video then goes on to describe the rules
that have been implemented, in order to prevent the bullying of the teachers by the students

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and the reporter telling the viewers the opinions of the teachers and the actions they wish
would be taken (9news Perth 2019, min. 1:17 - 1:32). This video follows a similar pattern to
that of the news report articles, as the story mainly focuses on what was done to teachers
and interviews by the people in authority who list out the steps being taken in order to
protect the teachers and prevent the issue of verbal abuse. It follows the pattern of
maintaining the interest of the viewers by capturing interviews from people who are relevant
to the story and it maintains the human interest by stating what is being done to help the
teachers (Lamble 2016).

Therefore, workplace bullying is represented in the media, in a manner which is

similar to how news reporting is done. The articles are represented in a manner which
increases the newsworthiness of the story, by maintaining the human interest aspect
and reporting the emotional reaction of the victims.

RACIAL VERBAL ABUSE

A total of four media data sources about verbal abuse, from the time period of 2020-2021,
were based on racial verbal abuse. Storytelling and the representation of the narrations of
the victims and the people who form a minority in Australia, were found to be highlighted in
all of these media sources.
“Never underestimate the power of your words, your stories and your conversations as
agents for change” is what Dr. Marrwah Ahmadzai states in her speech at Tedx
TalkCanberra YouTube video, which was uploaded by Tedx Talks on February 11, 2021.
The video that has been titled “The power of storytelling in breaking down barriers,” is a
video in which the victim narrates her personal experiences and stories of dealing with racial
verbal abuse in Australia and then goes on to give examples from her life as well as her
ideas on how to foster and promote tolerance for all in the Australian society. Dr. Marrwah
uses storytelling in a very engaging manner to not only share her story but to also spread
awareness and ideas on inclusion, respect and tolerance in the Australian society. There is
a use of anecdotes, humour, metaphors and interesting facts to capture viewers attention
(Ahmadzai 2021). She narrates her story of being a doctor in Australia and how she was
told by a patient that ‘I only speak to people with Australian visas’, and quotes her humorous
response of how that was okay, since she had an Australian passport (Ahmadzai 2021, min
1:28-1:29). The Tedx Talk uses storytelling and the speaker’s personal experiences to
influence the audience and viewers and also to provide a sense of relatability and to
increase awareness towards a social issue, such as verbal abuse on the basis of race, in
this particular video. There is a culmination of the ‘I’ and ‘you’ in the Tedx Talks and a sense
of ‘we’ that is created through the speech and narration of the personal stories of the
speaker, which is in totality a common project that invites the audience to take on specific
attitudes and behaviours and strongly participate in changes (Scotto di Carlo 2018, p 119).
Dr. Marrwah’s narration tries to promote the idea of conversations and dialogues to tackle
the challenges of intolerance and racism and she does so by including the audience and
viewers in her journey, making them a part of her ideas, through the use and emphasis on
the word “we” and narrating her story in a manner that states what happens in the Australian
society, with respect to intolerance and racism is a common practice, which everyone can
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relate to and therefore requires collective action from all. To evoke a sense of commonality
between the speakers and their audience, TED talks continuously use the inclusive word
‘we’ and this word and the use of language, constructs a positive tone and makes the
audience feel involved in what is being said, along with addressing the audience as peers
(Scotto di Carlo 2018, p 128).

Dr. Marrwah, in her speech, uses data and references from research survey results, to
support her story (Ahmadzai 2021, min 1:47-2:22). A very significant aspect of this speech
by Dr. Marrwah is her engaging and intriguing use of language. “I don’t consider ignorance
to be a bad thing. In fact, I’d like to think that we’re all tossed into its vast ocean from the
moment we are born. If we recognise and acknowledge that ignorance, we can use that
energy to swim towards shores of enlightenment” (Ahmadzai 2021, min 2:35-2:52), is how
Dr. Marrwah shares her ideas in the video and then goes to further explain her idea of how
conversations can foster connections and tolerance towards the different perspectives and
in turn recognise our shared humanity (Ahmadzai 2021, min 2:55-3:07). Therefore,
storytelling of racial verbal abuse is done in a manner that makes the audience feel like they
are a part of the conversation and a larger picture and they can actively contribute to the
overall betterment of what is being discussed. In TED talks, it is typically the speaker who is
an expert, is directly interacting with the audience and especially with non-experts on that
particular topic. Above all, the presentations should be dynamic and try to transmit
enthusiasm, passion and a sense of belongingness and a sense of inclusion, as this is
considered fundamental for the success of TED talks (Scotto di Carlo 2018, p 122).
In other instances from social media, a post by a media user, Vivienne Mark on April 18
2020, states “ I have experienced racial abuse whilst working in pharmacy and on Vic
streets but 99% of the times I feel extremely safe and accepted in Melbourne. Melbourne is
a culturally diverse and tolerant city. Physical and verbal abuse is NOT OK! #loveMelb
#NoRacism.” The media user simply shares her experience of facing verbal abuse on the
basis of race at her workplace and at the same time shares her thoughts of feeling safe in
Melbourne, most of the time. She portrays her opinion of Melbourne to be positive with
regards to diversity and then ends her post with the stand of being against physical and
verbal abuse and the use of hashtags that preach “no racism” and “love melbourne” (Mark
2020, para 1). Another Twitter user (Correctrixaegrota 2020, para 1) in her post narrates
how she works as an interpreter with doctors, who while assessing people’s workplace and
road injuries, indulge in verbal abuse with patients who are uneducated immigrants and the
doctors get away with more “rudeness” with them.
Both these Twitter posts describe experiences of racial abuse that are personal stories and
are presented in simple language. A few words sum up the experience of the users. While
Vivienne’s (2020, para 1) post is about her personal experience, Correctrixaegrota (2020,
para 1) describes her experience as a bystander. Social media is used simply to share
information and experience along with their personal opinions to support their stories. While
Vivienne shares her personal opinion of Melbourne being an inclusive city overall,
Correctrixaegrota shares her opinion, which is of the doctors being more rude to immigrant
patients. Social media can be used to organise collective action and facilitate mutual
engagement of different social forces and therefore, Twitter, here is used to share

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information and promote engagement on the topic of racial verbal abuse (Wang and Chu
2019, p 394).

Therefore, racial verbal abuse on social media is represented in a manner that

engages the media users and promotes collective action through storytelling and the
sharing of personal experiences and narratives.

The news article by SBS, published on the 10th of January 2021, reports the story of racial
verbal abuse against Indian cricketers in Australia. The article is titled “Reaction to the SCG
Test verbal abuse saga” and only discusses the strong reactions of the cricket players as
well as the members of the council and officials. The article just reports the strong reactions
to the racial verbal abuse, with no light on what the root problem of the abuse was. The
article starts with a quote by the Indian cricket team captain and includes a quote by the
chief executive of International Cricket Council (SBS news 2021).
The news article simply maintains its newsworthiness by quoting powerful people and
people in authoritative positions and does not shed light on any other aspect of racial verbal
abuse (Lamble 2016). Therefore, like I argued above, reported stories represent verbal
abuse in a manner in which the newsworthiness of the story is maintained with the
aim of prompting the audience interest in the story.

THEME 6. TROLLING IN THE MEDIA

“Trolled to death : Model Charlotte Dawson bombarded with vile messages over Twitter” is
the headline of an article by the DailyMail , published on 23rd February 2014. The article
reports the death of model Charlotte Dawson and how trolling and social media bullying led
her to take this extreme step. The article begins by stating the summary of what happened
and how the model “had struggled against vile internet trolls in the past” (Webb 2014, para
1). As was described in Bishop’s (2014) study of the representation of “trolls,” the moral
panic around the trolls of the internet in Australia and New Zealand, started with the suicide
of Charlotte Dawson in 2014. The article reports how Dawson had previously made a
suicide attempt in 2012, because of an ongoing tirage of abuse on Twitter (Webb 2014, para
1-3). The article mentions a quote from the Kate Carnell, chief executive of a non profit
organisation, Beyond Blue, in which she criticizes the social media platform, where this
verbal abuse took place in the first place, for not signing up to an Australian government
complaint-handling program, designed to remove the harmful verbal abuse material from
social media sites (Webb 2014, para 4).

An article by ABC news has the headline “Charlotte Dawson’s death puts cyberbullying back
in spotlight” and was published on 24th February 2014. The headline itself represents how
the death of Dawson has brought back the attention to the actual issue and cause of
cyberbullying and trolling and what can be done to stop this issue as well as the
accountability of the platforms where this takes place. The article also mentions quotes by
Kate Carnell and her stand against online bullying (ABC news 2014). The article quotes her
as saying “because people can bully anonymously, it makes it more likely and more
dangerous” and then goes on to describe her opinion on what the victims of online bullying

31
should do in order to combat online bullying and links online bullying to workplace bullying
and mentions how there needs to be real penalties in place for people who engage in online
bullying (ABC news 2014, para 6-9). The article also mentions how there has been a federal
government scheme that handles hateful material on social media sites and how the
coalition government is designing more schemes to make the persecution of cyber trolls
easier (ABC news 2014, para 6-7). In both the articles, there is emphasis on the actions
against the social media verbal abuse and how the accountability of the social media
platforms. The facilitation of verbal abuse is taking place on the platforms that are also used
to create awareness against the same. Therefore, the articles report how the platforms are
being made accountable to fight trolling and hate that takes place on them.

In a YouTube video, posted by 60minutes Australia, on the 11th of October 2020, represents
another angle to the trolling that takes place on social media. The video reports the story of
cyberbullying and the role of social media, in an investigation of the issue, by the journalist,
Tom Steinfort, who interviews former employees of Facebook and Twitter and also reports
the fight towards the online attacks, led by high profile Australians, who themselves have
been a victim of online verbal abuse and discuss the impact of the online trolling and how
they want to fight back (60minutes Australia 2020). “It's good for business. There is a direct
correlation between how much time I spent on the platform and how much money the
platform makes” (60 minutes Australia 2020, min 1:12-1:17), says one of the interviewees in
the video, showing how the social media platforms benefit from trolls. Those who have been
bullied have been interviewed and their stand of getting laws to punish the trolls have been
represented in the video. This representation and the stand for accountability of the trolls
and the social media platforms is similar to that of the news reports.

The news of celebrity and high profile Australians being bullied online has been reported
and this has led to a discussion about online trolling and the laws against online bullying, for
instance, the sucide of Charlotte Dawson, first brought attention to the issue.
In a recent article by ABC news, published on the 15th June, there is an insight into the
news laws that have been introduced to protect people from online trolls and online bullying
(Doran 2021). The article quotes prominent online safety advocate Sonya Ryan, whose
daughter was murdered by a man who groomed her using a fake online identity. “Just as we
have protections for people that try and harm those offline, we need to absolutely make sure
we have the same protections for the harms that are happening online” (Doran 2021, p 7-8)
quotes the article and also describes how the new laws against online bullying to be “world’s
first” and would change the narrative, give powers and encourages the victims to come
forward (Doran 2021, p 11-12). The article gives examples of threats and verbally abusive
behaviour that takes place online, with quotes from people in authority, like the
Communications minister and also from Molan, a sports journalist trolled online. With such
interviews, from the families of victims of online bullying, from people in authority as well as
the current famous victim of online trolling, contributes to the great human interest value of
the article.
Trolling and online bullying have been represented in the media as being directly correlated
to the affordances and responsibility of the social media platforms themselves. The

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protection of anonymity offers the abusers the benefits of unaccountability and they can hide
behind the veil of a fake profile and anonymous users are free to unleash their worst
possible instincts and the anonymity brings out their inner sadists and what began as an
anonymous practice has since become normalised and trolling is now an open practice as
the trollers now don’t bother to hide behind fake profiles (Hannon 2018, p 220). Originally
designed as a social tool, Twitter has since developed into an anti-social ‘hellscape,’ where
the 140 characters lead to vicious insults that seek to hurt and offend and the “Twitter wars”
have now themselves become the subject of news coverage (Hannon 2018, p 219).

Therefore, trolling and verbal abuse are not only represented by social media but also
facilitated by the social media platforms and the media reportage of trolling holds the
social media platforms accountable for trolling and the online cyberbullying that
takes place on the platforms.

The above analysis answers the research question of how verbal abuse is
represented in the new age of social media and by its media users.
With the above analysis and themes, I can conclude that social media represents
verbal abuse in a manner that emphasizes on the personal narratives of the victims,
along with representing the steps the victims can take to combat verbal abuse and its
impact. It can also be argued that social media gives a platform for the victims to
narrate their verbal abuse stories, but at the same time acts as a platform that
facilitates verbal abuse and bullying, in the form of ‘trolling’.

THEME 7. HOW IS THE TRADITIONAL MEDIA REPRESENTATION OF VERBAL ABUSE

DIFFERENT FROM THE SOCIAL MEDIA REPRESENTATION OF VERBAL ABUSE AND
ITS IMPACT ?

A total of 18 traditional media data sources were analysed, from the date range of
2018-2021, and a total of 20 social media posts were analysed from the date range of 2017-
2021. The major difference between the representation of verbal abuse in the traditional
media and the representation of verbal abuse on social media, is that social media platforms
represent more of the personal narratives of the verbal abuse victims and this is done in the
language and first hand perspective of the victim, whereas traditional media such news
sources, represent verbal abuse, majorly in a manner of reported news, which includes
incidents of verbal abuse and its impact, and this is done in a manner which fulfills the
newsworthiness of the story, such as the use of headlines like “It will probably get worse ’:
Gendered abuse and harassment rife in local councils,” of the article published by The
Sydney Morning Herald (Taylor 2021) or an article by the leading media article THE AGE,
titled “Spotting bullying a struggle for some early childhood teachers,” (Carey 2021), where
the headline grabs the reader’s attention through the mention of “childhood teachers” which
is of great human interest. Newsworthiness of the news stories is maintained and there is
understanding of the readership and the audience and the type of stories that the members
of the public and focus groups have identified as the most compelling and to the categories
of stories that attract the most hits online and on mobile devices and their choice is
sometimes influenced by the availability of high impact photos, sound or video and other

33
times the story itself is so big that it overwhelms everything else (Lamble 2016, p 33). For
instance, a headline of an article by ABC news (2017) is “Musician Kat Williams verbally
abused, told to expose herself on stage.” The mention of a high profile celebrity and what
has been done to her is mentioned in the headline itself, and this fosters engagement and
the interest of the reader and leads him to click on the article and view it.

As I discussed above, “victims have shared the desire to share their stories and
experiences, in order to reveal the complexity of abuse to others and also to prevent others
from experiencing the same pain” (R Linabary, Corple and Cookie 2019, p 1835). This can
be illustrated through the blog posts made by users on platforms such as Vocal.media. For
example, “I wish I would have read signs of verbal abusive before I got married, it would
have saved me from so much heartache and so much pain. Words can hurt a person more
then anyone knows cause it stays with you forever. It leaves a scar in your mind and heart
forever. So I want to be able to help those in a place I wish I would have known sooner”
(Karmen Palacios 2018, para 1) writes the user, in her blog post, titled “10 signs you are in
a verbally abusive relationship,” where she lists down the signs of a verbally abusive
relationship, along with examples and explanations of the same. She ends her article by
mentioning the contact details of the National Domestic Violence Hotline (Karmen Palacios
2018, para 14). Therefore, this blog post mentions both the experience of the victim, along
with her experience and evidence of how to tackle abuse.

Young people utilise digital media to find support, explore their identities and manage
boundaries (Hanckel, Vivienne et al 2019, p 1). This can be seen through the blog posts and
Facebook posts made by the users. “I was bullied at home, at the bus stop, on the bus
(driver and kids), at school (teachers, admin, kids), Sunday school, neighborhood. Every
single day! I have physically-abusive teacher stories! Ugh. First “love”, bosses, coworkers.
I’m so tired, y’all” (Deni Liketherestaurant 2021) is what one Facebook post says. There are
23 comments under this post, from the other users that give advice, suggestions and
support to the user and this is all from members of a similar group on Facebook, which is for
the support of verbal abuse victims. One comment that stands out and is an example of how
digital media is utilised to foster support from fellow media users who might be victims of
abuse as well.
“I was bullied in school from middle to high school and my young adult years up to my adult
years. I use to get beat up I use to get called names I use to get put down by family
neighborhood kids. I grew up hated upon no friends which I don’t regret. I have 1 ole time
friend tho. I have thoughts randomly.
You are not alone in this painful world! Us people that struggle and keep it going and staying
strong while them bullies stay weak and useless to society. They have no power in their own
world to keep shit going but we do!” (Walker 2021), writes one Facebook user, as a
response to the post of verbal abuse experience of a victim. Therefore, there is an
engagement that is fostered by the social media platforms, between the media users, who
might have gone through similar experiences.

34
Therefore, to answer the research question of what is the difference between the
representation of verbal abuse and its impact, I argue that the traditional media
reports the issue of verbal abuse in a manner which makes the story sensational and
newsworthy, with emphasis on what happened to the victim as well as the use of
language that grabs the reader’s attention. On the other hand, social media majorly
represents the issue of verbal abuse and its impact, in the form of the personal
narratives of the victim and this is done in a manner where the experiences are
shared to prevent others from experiencing the same pain.

I can, thus, end the discussion of my results by answering the research questions I
had set out to answer, along with the additional research question that I have
discussed in the themes above.

35
 CHAPTER FIVE : CONCLUSION

As I had begun my research, I had formulated three questions that I had set out to answer,
through the discourse analysis of the appropriate media data sources. The research
questions were centred around studying the media representations of verbal abuse and the
research questions included :-

1. How is verbal abuse represented in the new age of social media and by its
media users?

2. How does the online news and social media report verbal abuse and bullying
stories?

3. What is the difference between the traditional media representation of verbal

abuse and the new-age social media representation of the same?

I had also argued that first-person storytelling has been more important in revealing the truth
about victim abuse than mainstream media reporting and presented this as the hypothesis I
aim to study. I also established the scope of my research as well as the limitations of my
research, which mainly included the analysis of the way the media texts write and speak
about verbal abuse and bullying, with no exploration of the psychological impacts on the
victims who share their stories or the media users who read or view these media
representations of verbal abuse. The scope of the research was limited to 40-42 media
sources, collected from the date range of January 2017- June 2021. Two additional
secondary sources were analysed from 2014, which represented the coverage of the suicide
of the Australian model Charlotte Dawson, as a consequence of online bullying and trolling.
The media sources included 18 newspaper articles. The social media posts include 2
Facebook posts, 2 Instagram posts, 2 Twitter posts, 8 YouTube posts, 6 Vocal.media blog
posts. 3 blog posts from social organisations in Australia have also been included in the
data sample. The limitations of the research study included the study of the data through the
method of discourse analysis, which depends extensively on the addressee's subjective
interpretation of the data (Tenorio 2011, p 195). Since the analysis involves the study of
media texts and deriving meaning from the way they have presented verbal abuse, that is
reported stories and personal narratives, the researcher’s personal beliefs and way of
understanding the texts may influence the way he or she studies and draws conclusions of
the media texts. Another limitation included, the analysis of the data only through one
method as well as the limited sample size of 40-42 data sources, due to time constraints.

The review of the existing literature was carried out by studying categories of literature
based on the media themes that would supplement the study of the media representations
of verbal abuse and were concepts related to the way the media represents an issue. These
included storytelling in the media, social media platforms and affordances, representation of
trolling in the media and digital storytelling on the media platforms. These concepts were
studied through the existing literature on the same and were related to how storytelling

36
would be used to share the experiences of verbal abuse, the use of the social media
affordances and features to share the narratives of verbal abuse, the representation and
facilitation of trolling in and by the media and how digital storytelling is used on social media
to share experiences of verbal abuse.

After a study and review of the existing literature, it was concluded that the study addresses
a research gap as there was very little literature found on how verbal abuse is represented
in the media, from data available in the English language on the Monash Library Database
of Communications and Media academic sources and on the Google Scholar database,
from 2017-2021. The data sample was collected from social media platforms and through a
google search, where in the following keywords were used to filter out the data, from the
date range of January 2017 - June 2021. These keywords were ‘verbal abuse’, ‘verbal
abuse stories’, ‘verbal abuse survivors’, ‘bullying’ and ‘verbal abuse and social
organisations’. The sample included traditional media newspaper articles are included in the
data sample from media outlets such as the ABC news (2017-2021), the SBS news (2017-
2021), The Age (2021) , The Sydney Morning Herald (2021). The blog posts of social
organizations of Australia have also been taken into account. These include the Domestic
Violence Resource Centre Victoria (2021), Health Direct Australia (2021) and White Ribbon
Australia (2017).
The secondary sources from 2014 from the Dailymail and the ABC news, about the death of
Charlotte Dawson, were also included, to support the study. The social media posts included
2 Facebook posts (2021), 2 Instagram posts , 2 Twitter posts (2020-2021), 8 YouTube posts
(2018-2021) and 6 Vocal.media blog posts (2017-2021).

The above data was analysed through the methodology of discourse analysis, which was
used to study the media texts, to find out the way the verbal abuse stories have been
narrated and reported, the language used, the meaning behind what is written and said and
was also supported with evidence from the existing literature of the same theme. The results
were discussed by dividing the media data into six themes and studying them in the context
of those themes. These are the reported stories in the media of verbal abuse, personal
narratives of verbal abuse and bullying on social media, social organisations and
their digital media representation of verbal abuse, verbal abuse in different social
settings and its media representation ,‘trolling’ on the media platforms and how is the
traditional media representation of verbal abuse different from the social media
representation of verbal abuse.

After a study of the above themes, the following conclusions can be drawn and thus answer
the research questions as well as the additional research questions that emerge. How is
verbal abuse reported in the media? I can conclude that the reported media stories of
verbal abuse are represented in a sensational manner to increase the newsworthiness of
the news story and to evoke an emotional response from the media viewer or reader. How
are personal narratives of verbal abuse presented in the media? I can conclude that
the personal narratives of verbal abuse on social media also lead to a form of interaction,
wherein other media users provide their opinions and experiences in the form of comments
and the personal narratives of verbal abuse and its impact, through storytelling on social

37
media, adapt a creative and poetic mode of self expression. This also answers the question
of the differences and similarities between the reported articles of verbal abuse as well as
the personal narratives of the same. Reported news and the personal narratives of verbal
abuse on social media, both adapt a manner of sharing the emotional reaction of the victim.
However, reported stories in the news share stories which are newsworthy and would
increase the number of readers who view the story, whereas personal narratives on social
media foster support through comments from other users. I can, therefore, also prove and
state my initial thesis statement of how the first-person storytelling has been used more
in revealing the truth about victim abuse than mainstream media reporting as the
mainstream media reporting is biased because of the maintenance of the newsworthiness
of the story, as demonstrated above.

Another conclusion can be drawn from how the blog posts and videos made by social
organizations represent verbal abuse? I can conclude that the concept of media
framing, and rhetorical framing, by social organizations is used in order to describe
and evaluate and predict outcomes and solutions, for the social issue of verbal abuse
and its impact (Pietracatella and Brady 2016, p 59) and the video representations
adapt a creative and more engaging form of communication, with providing situations
as examples and actors performing those situations. In regard to how verbal abuse in
different social settings is represented, I can conclude that workplace bullying is
represented in a manner which increases the newsworthiness of the story, by
maintaining the human interest aspect and reporting the emotional reaction of the
victims. Racial verbal abuse on social media is represented in a manner that aims to
engage the media users and promote collective action through storytelling and the
sharing of personal experiences and narratives. I can also conclude that trolling and
verbal abuse are not only represented by social media but also facilitated by the social
media platforms and the media reportage of trolling holds the social media platforms
accountable for trolling and the online cyberbullying that takes place on the platforms.

Therefore, the above conclusions answer and demonstrate the representation of

verbal abuse on the social media platforms and thus answer the second research
question.
Lastly, I answer the last research question of how the traditional media representation
of verbal abuse is different from the social media representation of the same. I
conclude that the traditional media reports the issue of verbal abuse in a manner
which makes the story sensational and newsworthy, with emphasis on what
happened to the victim as well as the use of language that grabs the reader’s
attention. On the other hand, social media majorly represents the issue of verbal
abuse and its impact, in the form of the personal narratives of the victim.

After drawing conclusions from my research study, I can conclude that there is no
representation of the root cause problem of verbal abuse and bullying. In the data
analysis, it can be observed that the news media stories don’t really question who is causing
the issue of verbal abuse nor do they question what has led to the verbal abuse and what

38
caused the abuser to indulge in such behaviour. There is no accountability of the abuser
and what led him or her to behave in a verbally abusive manner. The media does not
represent the larger picture of verbal abuse nor does it address what the society is doing to
hold the abuser accountable for such behaviour. There is an establishment by the media to
put forward what happened to the victims, what were the ways in which verbal abuse and
bullying took place, the impact on the victims, the steps they can take to tackle the abuse as
well as contact the authorities. However, there is no conversation on what is actually
causing this verbal abuse and bullying and why it is taking place in the first place.

Verbal abuse is a part of the larger discussion in society of why it happens in the first place,
who causes it, and it cannot be looked at in isolation.

The indication for future research can be to look into how the media represents the laws and
action taken against verbal abuse perpetrators as well as how the media represents why
verbal abuse takes place and who causes it.

Therefore, I can conclude that the media represents verbal abuse, through different
themes, in a way that emphasises the victim and the impact on the victim as well as
what was done to the victim, but does not adequately represent who caused the
verbal abuse and why. I end my research study by indicating future research on
media representation of why verbal abuse takes place and who causes it as well as
the media representations of the laws against verbal abuse. The media adequately
represents what is done to the victims, what is said, and how the victims react to
verbal abuse and what can be done, in order to fight this abuse. However, the media
does not adequately represent the cause of verbal abuse, who causes this abuse and
why and what are the laws against those who carry out verbally abusive behaviour.
Therefore, future research should be made on how the media represents why verbal
abuse happens, who causes it and the laws against verbally abusive behaviour.

39
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