USE OF PASSIVE VOICE IN REPORTING GENDER-BASED VIOLENCE

Our project recognises that the use of passive voice focuses mainly on the victim and places the perpetrator in the background which can be detrimental to the discourse on gender-based violence. To do this, a dataset was prepared by collecting numerous media reports that adopted the passive writing style. Our code produced an accuracy of 81% using Python’s SpaCy library which identifies the passive voice in the provided headlines. It was concluded that we should move towards a more neutral and sensitive reportage.