A MULTIMODAL STUDY OF SELECTED TRADE UNION ANTI-RAPE CAMPAIGN IMAGES

Abstract

The scourge of rape and gender-based violence in the last two
decades and most especially during the Covid-19 lockdown crisis
was a major concern for various interest groups in Nigeria with a
myriad of consequences. Many studies have been carried out on
rape from various perspectives. These range from sociological,
psychological, and political. However, it is obvious that not many
studies have looked at the fight against rape from a Multimodal
Discourse angle. The study complements few existing studies on the
campaign against rape from the multimodal discourse perspective.
Kress and van Leuween’s Multimodal Grammar of Visual Design
Theory which was hinged on Halliday’s (1994) Systemic Functional
Linguistic was employed for the analysis. The data were derived
from the WhatsApp platform of Trade Union Women Commission
when a major campaign against rape in Nigeria was flagged in
virtually all the thirty-six states of the federation in August 2020.
Ten of these images which comprised the campaign posters and the
visual pictures of the campaign were purposively selected for the
analysis. The result of the study revealed the potency in the use of
both linguistic and visual images in conveying the cogent
information to the society while surreptitiously exposing the
ideological leanings of the group. The relevance of this study lies in
its being a useful tool to mitigate the menace of rape in Nigeria