Movimentos de empatia no discurso da violência conjugal: uma análise linguístico-cognitiva no enquadre comunicativo dos boletins de ocorrência

Abstract

This study investigates the phenomenon of empathy in recorded police reports of four female victims of intimate partner violence, who went to a local Police Station for Women, located in Fortaleza, Ceará. The aim of this study is to observe and analyze the emergence of empathic indication provided by the participants, from the perspective of functions of empathy (MARTINOVSKY; MAO, 2009). For this, we assessed how these women perform their face work (GOFFMAN, 1967) through the emotive communication devices (CAFFI; JANNEY, 1994; CAFFI, 2007) and cognitive mechanisms linguistic (LAFOFF; JOHNSON, 1980; LAKOFF, 1987; JOHNSON 1987) as strategies for interactional engagement, mitigation and the building of multidirectional dynamic empathy movements. We adopted Conversation Analysis to analyze the four interactions, which were subdivided into discursive topics, in order to facilitate the identification of empathy movements, as well as face preservation and face protection of the participants. We also performed a statistical frequency test, named chi-square, to see if there were any statistically significant difference in empathic surfacing and in face work demonstrations between the group of women who wanted to take legal action against their abusers ("offensive empathy") and the other group who had no such interest ("defensive empathy"). We found a difference in the number of occurrences of empathic movements and actions of face preservation and face protection between the groups of "offensive empathy" and "defensive empathy", which was confirmed by the following result, obtained from a chi-squared test; X² = 4.00; df = 1; p <0.05. We perceived that the "defensive empathy" group demonstrated higher index of empathic movements in relation to the "Offensive empathy". We observed that the "defensive empathy" group presented a more significant level of empathic movements in relation to "offensive empathy" one. Yet, we found that, in this discursive event, detected empathy movements are dynamic and occur in multi directions (from the victim to the offender and also from the police officer to the victim). We perceived that, although the production of police reports done in a Police Station for Women constitute a structured and well define discourse event, face preservation and protection could be seen as propellers for actions that indicate the empathy surfacing. In addition, we observed that the cognitive linguistic mechanisms play an important role in building empathic elicitation strategies.