Analyzing social representation of gender-based violence throughout media discourse. The case of the Italian press

Abstract

This work aims to provide a tool to analyze social representations of gender-based violence, an issue that is receiving increasing media attention in recent years. Focusing on the Italian case, the re- search questions we try to answer are: 1) How is gender-based violence represented in the Italian press? 2) How does Italian press represent the women victims of gender-based violence and the men authors of such violence? Particularly, we try to understand how press contributes to the social discourse on gender-based violence and what role it plays in the perpetuation of a social structure based on unequal power relations between genders.The starting hypothesis is that the press can contributes to create and reinforce stereotypes and prejudices about the role of women in society, thus favoring the persistence of those relations of material and symbolic domination, that still too often lead to gender-based violence.Our work is based on the data collected within the research project STEP – Stereotypes and prejudice. Toward a cultural change in gender representation in judicial, law enforcement and media narrative. It relies on the analysis of a corpus containing more than 16,000 articles published in Italian newspapers in the period between the 1st of January 2017 and the 31st December 2019, dealing with the issue of gender-based violence and with the crimes connected to it: domestic violence, rape, femicide, stalking, women trafficking.

Women first-person narrative as a tool for deconstructing stereotyped representations of gender-based violence

“…The social representation of gender-based violence constitutes a subject of research in many sub-disciplinary areas of sociology such as political sociology, sociology of communication, sociology of security, sociology of the family, sociology of deviance, and so on [6]. This widespread interest of sociologists in this topic is due to the crucial role of culturally transmitted social mechanisms [7][8], which are reflected in the language through which institutions and social actors represent male violence against women, thus reproducing the conditions underlying it [9][10][11].…”

“…This type of representation is made possible through a distortion mechanism that Romito calls "linguistic avoidance", namely: «a technique, deliberate or unconscious, thanks to which the perpetrators of violence against women and children -men -disappear from discourses and texts on male violence, whether these are international documents, scientific work or the popular press» [21, p. 45]. Linguistic avoidance consists in the use of expressions such as "marital disputes" or "domestic violence" instead of "male violence" and "husband's violence" [22], or in the common practice of de-humanizing the perpetrator by depicting him as a "monster" [23] or as a beast [24]: e.g., «It was a blow for the woman, who came face-to-face with a real ogre» 5 or «A raptus that suddenly turned the boyfriend into a monster» 6 . Such expressions, indeed, conceal the relation between male gender and violence.…”

“…There is a tendency of newspapers, widely confirmed in the sociological literature on the topic [22; 26; 24; 27], to de-responsibilize the author of the violence and to not stigmatize the phenomenon. Such tendency, that contributes to make the abuses of women socially acceptable, is mainly based on three biases that occur very often in the journalistic and judicial narrative of gender-based violence: the lovers' quarrel, the jealousy, the raptus [6].…”

“…Talking about the woman who is victim of violence by referring to her youth, beauty and motherhood means not to recognize her a full subjectivity and autonomy, thus fostering prejudices and stereotypes that perpetuate the old dominant gender order and that normalize male violence. In other words, women are not protagonist either when they are abused, stalked, or killed because the dominant perspective is still the male one [6].…”

“…Taken from the newspaper's article Violentava la figlia: operaio condannato (He used to rape his daughter; worker condemned), published by the daily newspaper "Il Tirreno" the 18 th of November 2017 6. Taken from the newspaper's article Violenza sulle donne: i ragazzi dicono "no" (Violence against women: youngsters say "no"), published by the daily newspaper "Il Tirreno" the 14th of February 2017.…”