Legal cynicism in Men’s Rights discourses: Using corpus linguistics to investigate how distrust in the legal system excuses and perpetuates sexual violence against women

The term legal cynicism refers to a type of legal disengagement which is associated with a lack of internal commitment to follow legal rules and a failure to acknowledge legal authority, typically stemming from perceived ongoing injustices and rights deprivations. This perception of the criminal justice system enables individuals in extremist communities to rationalise criminal actions, leading to an increased propensity for violent behaviour. Effectively identifying content such as this within online discourses has been argued to be the initial step in mitigating this propensity for violence and corpus linguistic methods, employed as entry points into these discourses, offer effective tools to do such analysis.

Using a 122,000-word corpus of online discourses produced by Men’s Right’s Activists (MRAs) on blogs and the subreddit r/MensRights, quantitative and qualitative approaches are used in this corpus-assisted discourse analysis to determine how legal cynicism is indexed and generated. The ways in which the criminal justice systems in both the United States and United Kingdom are contextualised and reframed to embed legal cynicism in MRA discourses, and the evidential and legal processes highlighted as problematic by MRAs, are explored. The paper discusses the impact of this reframing of the criminal justice system on the potential for violence through conspiracy theories and legal disengagement. It concludes with suggestions for addressing legal cynicism through prebunking and educational strategies designed to challenge misconceptions of criminal justice processes.