@article{Sarah Gambo, Woyopwa Shem & Siman Lazarus_2022, title={Social Media and Rape Discourse in Nigeria: An Exploratory Study of Facebook }, volume={27}, url={http://jmcd-uok.com/index.php/jmcd/article/view/250}, abstractNote={<p>In recent years, social media has proved to be an indispensable tool for bringing women’s rights issues especially rape to the attention of a wider public. Therefore, it is against this backdrop that this study examined the theme "social media and rape discourse in Nigeria: an exploratory study of Facebook." To aptly investigate the subject matter, this paper adopted mixed research methods, which are content analysis, interview, and observation. Albert Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) was adopted as the theoretical framework.  The researchers content analysed and also observed posts in two Facebook groups between January and June 2020. In the same vein, five communication experts who were also social media users were interviewed to ascertain how social media (Facebook) has impacted rape discourse in Nigeria. It was found that social media users (Facebook) give priority to rape-related subjects and that the majority of the users of social media were anti-rape advocates as reflected in their comments on rape-related posts. Furthermore, the findings of this study revealed that social media is a fertile ground for public debate hence it has positively impacted the national rape discourse in Nigeria. The paper suggests that future studies should incorporate more social networking sites and time frames.</p>}, number={2}, journal={Journal of Mass Communication Department, Dept of Mass Communication, University of Karachi}, author={Sarah Gambo, Woyopwa Shem & Siman Lazarus}, year={2022}, month={Dec.} }