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The language employed by the police helped mobilise a false narrative, writes ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� College Utrecht Assistant Professor Patricia Canning about her research on a football stadium tragedy.

In an article just published in Patricia Canning recounts the most recent findings of her long-term research on the Hillsborough disaster of April 15 1989, which led to the deaths of 96 Liverpool fans. The fans were crushed on the terraces at the FA Cup semi-final as their team started play on the pitch. They were falsely blamed for the tragedy.

The publication is part of a wider research, in which Patricia Canning focuses on the way institutional agents such as police officers, prosecutors, and government officials use language to shape narratives along particular lines. Her research has shown, for example, how the ways in which police officers elicit the “what happened” following an event and how they report it in writing can yield, amongst other things, specific attitudes police hold about the event or the people involved.

In the Hillsborough case, she has worked with survivors as well as official court documents and the evidence generated in the investigations following the disaster to analyse the mismatch between what actually happened and what was presented in witness statements.

“My new research has delved even further into those statements and revealed how the language used in police statements helped fuel the false narrative about what happened that day. I have shown, for example, that more subtle aspects which had the effect of blame-shifting characterised the process of taking statements from football fans and Hillsborough residents.”

"As linguistic assessment of witness statements shows, a statement doesn’t need to be literally altered to give a misleading picture of events.”