On Violence:
Active Voice vs. Passive Voice
Updated Dec. 8, 2023 12:38 p.m. ET
Use active voice, not passive voice, to describe acts of violence.
The active voice (ex. “Israeli forces deliberately killed Shireen Abu Akleh”) is clear and emphatic: the subject (Israeli forces) actively performs the action (killing) onto the object (Shireen Abu Akleh), and so both perpetrator and victim are revealed clearly.
In contrast, the passive voice (ex. “Shireen Abu Akleh was killed by Israeli forces”) can be insidiously vague. In the passive, the subject and object in the active-voice sentence switch places: the new subject (Shireen Abu Akleh) passively receives the action (being killed), and so the new object (Israeli forces) becomes a footnote that can then be obscured or omitted entirely (ex. “Shireen Abu Akleh died after sustaining a gunshot wound”).
The active voice reveals what the passive voice conceals.
But what does it matter how a sentence is structured if its substance goes unchanged? Studies show that using the passive “differentially impacts readers’ capacity not only to recall, but [to empathize] with such hardship narratives.” For example, in a study of how news media desensitizes consumers to violence against women, male readers attributed less harm to victims of murder, sexual assault, battery, and robbery — and less perpetrator responsibility — in the passive versus the active. Per a now-unpublished BBC News style guide, the passive “takes the life out of the action and distances it from any identifiable source,” like an impunity “safety net”: “Governments, politicians, and officials of all kinds love the passive because individual actions are buried beneath a cloak of collective responsibility.”
And so, the active and the passive can be weaponized in concert to spin a narrative web full of bias, and “[probably unconsciously]” in large part. Research shows that the passive predominates “mass media reports describing male violence against women,” U.S. textbooks describing white violence against nonwhite people, and so on, to the detriment of oppressed people. Inversely, the active voice was found to predominate U.S. textbooks describing racialized violence against whites, reports of violence “when women are the perpetrators and men the victims,” and so on, to the advantage of historical oppressors. Oscillation between the two can be used not only to produce consent for some acts of violence over others (ex. “Mistakes were made [by us]” vs. “They made a terrible mistake”), but to indicate who and what to condemn, without ever saying a word.
It is our mandate that acts of violence be described in the active voice over the passive voice whenever possible — particularly in heds, deks, and ledes — in order to reduce bias, encourage transparency, and foster the conditions necessary for greater accountability and justice.
Case Studies
“Four fragile lives found ended in evacuated Gaza hospital” was published by The Washington Post’s Miriam Berger, Evan Hill, and Hazem Balousha on Dec. 2, 2023, 11:02 p.m. EST. Following criticism (ex. “… a puzzle to solve, a gemstone of passivity where human agency glints mysteriously in the facets. Whose lives? Who found them? Who ended them?”), the headline was updated to “Israel’s assault forced a nurse to leave babies behind. They were found decomposing.” as of Dec. 8, 2023, 12:38 p.m. EST.