Detecting Gender-Based Violence Discourse Using Deep Learning: A CNN-LSTM Hybrid Model Approach

Abstract

Gender-Based Violence (GBV) is a critical social issue impacting millions worldwide. Social media discussions offer valuable insights into public awareness, sentiment, and advocacy, yet manually analyzing such vast textual data is highly challenging. Traditional text classification methods often struggle with contextual understanding and multi-class categorization, making it difficult to accurately identify discussions on Sexual Violence, Physical Violence, and other topics. To address this, the present study proposes a hybrid deep learning approach combining Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks. CNN is utilized for extracting key linguistic features, while LSTM enhances the classification process by maintaining sequential dependencies. This hybrid CNN+LSTM model is evaluated against standalone CNN and LSTM models to assess its performance in classifying GBV-related tweets. The dataset was sourced from Kaggle, containing real-world Twitter discussions on GBV. Experimental results demonstrate that the hybrid model surpasses both CNN and LSTM models, achieving an accuracy of 89.6%, precision of 88.4%, recall of 89.1%, and F1-score of 88.7%. Confusion matrix and ROC curve analyses further confirm the hybrid model’s superior performance, correctly identifying Sexual Violence (82%), Physical Violence (15%), and Other (3%) cases with reduced misclassification rates. These results suggest that combining CNN’s feature extraction with LSTM’s contextual learning provides a more balanced and effective classification model for GBV-related text. This work supports the development of AI-based tools for social media monitoring, policy-making, and advocacy, helping stakeholders better understand and respond to GBV discussions. Future research could explore transformer-based models like BERT and real-time classification applications to further improve performance.