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 research 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.

Keywords

• gender-based violence
• media
• stereotypes and prejudices
• role of women in society