“What media space for sexual violence in times of armed conflict? An overview of media coverage in Le Monde since 1944”

Based on the collection of press articles from the newspaper Le Monde and obtained via the Europresse database, this communication aims at studying the media coverage of sexual violence committed in wartime from 1945 to the present day. This analysis has been conducted in a general way without determining the conflicts studied, thus allowing a maximisation of cases. The articles were searched for using the following keyword combination: “(war | wars | conflict | conflicts) & (rape | rape | “sexual violence” | “sexual violence”).

         The purpose of this work is twofold. The first step is to identify and present the evolution of the number of articles obtained, all conflicts combined, over the entire period studied in order to identify the ebb and flow on the subject. Then, a more detailed analysis will identify the conflicts appearing in the corpus, their proportion in the total number of articles and the evolution of their media presence over time. 

         Conceived as a draft in the first empirical stage of a thesis work, this analysis has to be enriched and developed and shows limits that we will point out.