Victims and Perpetrators of Gender-Based Violence in the Italian Press
This is what emerges from the research project STEP – Stereotypes and prejudice. Toward a cultural change in gender representation in judicial, law enforcement and media narrative, that analyzed 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 crimes connected to gender-based violence: domestic violence, rape, femicide, stalking, women trafficking.
From the research three main aspects characterizing the journalistic representation of gender-based violence emerged: the centrality of women in the journalistic narrative of the gender-based violence and the parallel marginality of the men who perpetrated it; a de-responsibilization of the violence’s perpetrator; a re-victimization of women, who are often considered co-responsible of the violence they suffered.
This paper presents the preliminary results of a follow-up of the research project "STEP", titled "STEPSISTER. Stereotypes and prejudices in press representation of gender-based violence", and focuses in particular on the journalistic representation of the women and men involved in cases of gender-based violence in public spaces and non-intimate relationships perpetrated in 2024.
The aims of the work are to two: a) to find out if, over the time, Italian journalists have changed their way to represent gender-based violence or if they continue to reproduce the stereotypes and prejudices emerged from STEP research; b) to understand if the journalistic representation of gender-based violence perpetrated in public spaces and non-intimate relationships present the same characteristics of the representation of the other forms of gender-based violence.