Digital Discourses on Gender-Based Violence in Trinidad and Tobago

Gender-based violence (GBV) represents a highly pervasive issue in the Caribbean, posing a threat to women’s voice and agency across the region (ECLAC, Bringing an end to violence against women and girls and femicide or feminicide: A key challenge for building a care society. https://oig.cepal.org/sites/default/files/22-01012_end_violence_ing_web.pdf , 2021). This paper critically explores digital discourses on GBV in Trinidad and Tobago, with a focus on three major critical incidents that took place between November 2020 and January 2021. The deaths of Ashanti Riley, Andrea Bharrat, and Krystal Primus-Espinoza catalyzed public attention and generated a considerable response on social media platforms, partially aided by a surge of digital access and traffic in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. We collected and analyzed Facebook comments to news pieces covering the three deaths published by the three main online newspapers in the country (the Trinidad and Tobago Guardian, The Trinidad and Tobago Newsday and the Trinidad Express). Data collection mapped the evolution of digital discussions stemming from the initial news stories (i.e., the victims going missing) and their numerous follow-ups as the events unfolded. By means of a Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS) approach (KhosraviNik, Social media critical discourse studies (SM-CDS). In Flowerdew J, Richardson JE (eds) Routledge handbook of critical discourse studies. Routledge, Abingdon, pp. 582–596, 2017; Esposito and KhosraviNik, Digital distribution processes and “new” research tools in SM-CDS. In: KhosraviNik M (ed) Social media and society: integrating the digital with the social in digital discourse. John Benjamins Publishing, pp. 15–37, 2023), the analysis unpacks the main digital debates related to GBV and the discursive construction of the victims, the perpetrator(s), and the state, shedding light on the pervasiveness and normalization of GBV in the Caribbean.