Terror at Home: On the Rhetoric of Domestic Violence Legislation in the United Kingdom and Spain

The present study analyses two Parliamentary Acts on the subject of domestic violence: the Spanish Organic Law 1/2004 on Comprehensive Protection Measures against Gender Violence and the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act 2004 from the United Kingdom. The analysis of the texts (organised into two corpora, SPA and UKA respectively) was carried out in three different stages, the first one consisting in the automatic processing of the two texts using Monoconc. After doing so, the lexical component of the two corpora was examined on a superficial level, followed by a discursive analysis of the macrostructural organization of both legal texts. The third stage of analysis focused upon the number and types of metadiscourse markers, capable of unveiling interpersonal relationships in both corpora. These three different but complementary levels of analysis have led us to conclude that the Acts represent different stances from which the subject of domestic violence is envisaged in the Spanish and English contexts. Both legal texts display specific traits that pertain to the different legal cultures these legal instruments arise from. Additionally, such traits reflect rhetorical and cultural dissimilarities in the way in which domestic terror is fought and offer clues for the translation of these Acts.