Media Representations of Violence Against Women in Politics: A Comparative Study of Mexico and Colombia

Existing research on violence against women in politics (VAWIP) has focused on its effects in formal politics, leaving a gap regarding VAWIP beyond institutional spaces, especially the media. While numerous studies examine media discourses around gender-based violence, studies specifically addressing media coverage of VAWIP remain scarce. This paper addresses this gap by examining how VAWIP is framed, represented, and reported by newspapers. Media is a fundamental social actor, playing a dual role as a mirror of entrenched power dynamics, dominant social norms, and underlying cultural values, and as an active agent shaping public attitudes, behaviors, and perceptions. This paper asks how online newspapers frame, name, and report on cases of VAWIP. We answer this question with a comparative analysis of Colombia and Mexico. These countries rank among the most dangerous for women in politics while also having robust legislation and activism to end VAWIP. We collected over 2000 news reports on twelve cases of VAWIP, resulting in over 1300000 words. We use critical discourse and media framing along three levels to analyze these data. We conducted textual analysis, temporal distributions of coverage, topic modeling, and utilized Large Language Models to analyze whether and how media discourses reflect or contest socio-political power relations around VAWIP. We find that lethal violence and violence against women in formal politics received the most media coverage. However, this was mediated by the victims’ visibility. Further, the problem is seldom framed as VAWIP, and rarely linked to structural gender inequalities. In Mexico, however, few cases were dismissed as drug-related crimes and framed as VAWIP following rulings by electoral authorities. In contrast, in Colombia, cases were framed as ‘regular’ political violence, suggesting that legal tools have an important effect in shaping media framings. Additionally, we found that there is little mention of how VAWIP affects women’s representation, gender equality, or democracy. Our findings suggest that even in countries with robust legislation and broad discussion of VAWIP -often involving the media- the problem is still understood as resulting from political differences instead of being tied to structural gender inequalities and that its effects impact the quality of democracy.