Emotivity mechanisms in reports of violence: strategies of empathic elicitation and of social communication (re)framing

Abstract

In this work, we sought to analyze the dynamics of the interaction between two women in situations of violence and female police agents, at the time of police report registration at a Police Department Specialized for Women in Fortaleza, the emotive categories proposed by Caffi and Janney (1994) - evaluation, proximity, specificity, evidentiary and volitionality -, and to investigate the relationship between these emotivocommunicative mechanisms and their role as empathic elicitation strategy (MARTINOVSKY; MAO, 2009 ; 1967). The aim is, therefore, to examine emotional communication in a context of violence and its relationship with the processes of sociocommunication (re)framing in authentic conversations among women. We saw that it is from the notion of framing that the interactional situation is organized and that social roles are defined. In the case of women who went to perform the police report, each one claims an appropriate social image to the rules of the communicative interaction, which they are part of. For example, in the case of the two participants who did not wish to request legal action against their aggressors, only to register the complaint, we detected that they used emotional categories in order to gain the empathy of the interlocutor and to establish a greater adequacy to their sociocommunication framework.