Description
This paper explores how British editorials and opinion columns construct migrant, refugee, and asylum-seeking women as subjects of moralized and racialized polarization. Drawing on Lilie Chouliaraki’s Wronged: The Weaponization of Victimhood (2024), the study approaches victimhood as a communicative act that distributes empathy, responsibility and exclusion along intersecting lines of race, gender and citizenship. It asks how elite media discourses turn humanitarian concern into a moral terrain where compassion and othering coexist.
The study uses a dataset of 1,144 editorials and opinion columns published between 2015 and 2025 across six major British newspapers: The Sun, The Independent, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, The Guardian and The Times. Through thematic content analysis, it looks at how the figures of the migrant, refugee and asylum-seeking woman are placed within public debates about integration, security, motherhood and belonging. Rather than making a simple comparison between right- and left-leaning newspapers, the paper seeks to understand how moral emotions such as pity, fear, resentment and care work as political tools that sustain symbolic boundaries in public discourse. This study argues that the editorial sphere is an important site for understanding how media institutions shape moral hierarchies of deservingness in multicultural Britain. The paper aims to contribute to wider discussions about affect, morality and power in international communication.
