The book, edited by Patricia Bou-Franch, consists of seven articles focusing on the issue of aggressive language directed towards women. Subsumed within this is the lexicalization of rape, the instantiation of gender ideology, the traditional use of aggressive language in the partners’ space, the presence of violent language directed at women in written and online media, and even in parliamentary institutions. The triangle formed by the transreferential realities of women, aggression, and language is investigated in the volume's key reading, which includes discussions on the dimensions of language, personal or collective attitudes, cultural anthropology, and statistics, as we see in chapter 5 (by José Santaemilia-Ruiz & Sergio Maruenda-Bataller) and chapter 6 (by Kristin L. Anderson & Jill Cermele). Language violence is not just described from an extrinsic standpoint but it is also examined intrinsically and psychologically, from the standpoint of the constitutive and formative language functions that can bring about societal attitudes based on beliefs.

From a sociolinguistic perspective in chapter 3 (by Shonna L. Trinch), aggression against women is considered to be a social construct that needs to be amended because it acts like an axiomatic datum, a postulate omnipresent in the minds of women, men, and children alike. In chapter 5, Santaemilia-Ruiz & Maruenda-Bataller demonstrate that the dimension of language violence against women manifests itself across a whole semantic field and has multiple forms, but at its core is linguistic sexism as a form of gender inequality, manifest in fixed phrases such as mujer maltradada or battered woman. As Anderson & Cermele suggest in their contribution, the syntagmatics of violence are both bilateral and collective, in other words, both private and public, while the paradigmatics of violence vary between (i) two men, (ii) two women, or (iii) a man and a woman in aggressor and victim roles. The present book deals only with (iii)—the physical forms of violence against women that rely on physical strength, intimidation, rape, and sexual assault (see chapter 2 by Frederick Attenbourough).

Attenborough also reveals how the rendition of violence against women can be perverted using techniques that minimize or distort facts by changing the focus from the abominable deeds of the aggressor onto insignificant details related to the victim, thus ignoring the latter's suffering and even blaming them, the most cynical interpretation of all. If the direct and online private renderings circumscribe aggression against women to lexical roles and themes with common features, as Patricia Bou-Franch & Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich suggest in chapter 4, in the public political space of chapter 7 (by Marianthi Georgalidou) the same (third) pattern is attributed strong negative connotations that may go as far as stating that ‘female politicians are portrayed as incompetent, irrational individuals in need of supervision and control’ (10).

In the present volume, a lot of aspects of language aggression against women have been so well documented that this work can provide all readers with a good overview of the contemporary problem of gender inequality still present in society, the media, online communication, and even political speeches.