Silent Cries and Digital Voices: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of the Abuse and Victimisation of People with Disabilities on Instagram

Abuse and victimisation of persons with disabilities (PWDs) are recurring concerns in disability discourse, yet limited attention has been given to how advocacy organisations construct these experiences through coordinated verbal and visual resources. The study examines the representation of abuse and victimisation of PWDs in five purposively selected graphics posted on the official Instagram page of the Disability Rights Advocacy Centre (DRAC) in 2022. The study adopts a qualitative descriptive research design and employs Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA), integrating Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Kress and van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar (VG). The analysis examines ideational/representational, interpersonal/interactive, and textual/compositional meanings realised through dialogue, participant roles, gaze, social distance, framing, information value, salience, colour, posture, and layout. Findings reveal five related patterns of abuse: neglect and social isolation; institutional dismissal and derogatory language; sexual objectification and exploitation; social denigration and discrimination; and economic exploitation accompanied by threats to mobility. The findings further show that linguistic and visual choices not only depict abuse but also assign responsibility, construct unequal power relations, and position viewers to recognise the rights and agency of PWDs. The study demonstrates how advocacy graphics can expose and contest discourses that normalise abuse against PWDs.