Language, Power and The Legitimation of Domestic Abuse: A Discourse-Analytic Study of Perpetrators’ Placation In Lagos and Ogun States

Abstract

This study investigates how language produces, sustains, and legitimises domestic violence in Nigeria, with a specific focus on Lagos and Ogun States. Framed within Norman Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Austin and Searle’s Speech Act Theory, and drawing on Dobash and Dobash’s Feminist/Patriarchal Theory and Goode’s Resource Theory as contextual frameworks, the study analyses the discourse of three domestic violence survivors gathered through in-depth phenomenological interviews. The central argument is that domestic violence in Nigeria is not perpetuated solely through physical force but through a layered discursive apparatus: the vocabulary of survivors, the illocutionary force of institutional speech acts, the grammatical erasure of perpetrators from accountability, and the ideological language of family and community systems that placate abusers. Particular analytical attention is paid to the ‘language of domestic violence’, the lexical choices, metaphors, grammatical constructions, and speech act functions through which abuse is enacted, narrated, and normalised and to the discursive exemption of the male perpetrator from accountability at every level of social and institutional discourse. Findings reveal that corrupt institutional declarations, coercive family directives, and the grammar of passivisation collectively constitute a discursive architecture that protects perpetrators and silences survivors. Recommendations focus on language-sensitive institutional reform, the enforcement of the Violence Against Persons Prohibition (VAPP) Act, and survivor economic and discursive empowerment.