Institutional Violence in Italy: Blaming Women in the Courts and the Press

This paper moves from three research projects on the stereotypes and prejudices that underly the social representation of gender violence in Italy and will analyse how women are exposed to secondary and tertiary victimization. Women keep on being blamed for the crimes committed against them, both in the courts and the press. After having investigated almost eight hundred court judgements on male violence against women (years 2017-2024), we will argue how the results show a clear tendency to redistribute the responsibilities of these crimes between the perpetrator and the victim, leading not only to secondary victimization but also to tertiary victimization. A process that implies that men and women are not treated as equal citizens even when it comes to the judiciary sphere, where for women it harder to obtain justice ones a crime has been perpetrated against them. We wil see how this unequal treatment in court ends up affecting the quality of Italian institutions as well as the democratic fiber of the nation.