Social Representations of Gender Violence in Italy

This volume illustrates and analyses the stereotypes and prejudices underlying the social representation of violence against women as it is narrated and described in Italy by the press and by court judgements. After a theoretical reflection on the role of culture and socialization in reproducing the conditions underlying gender-based violence and its normalization, and after reconstructing the historical evolution of gender roles and the stages of women’s condition, the book presents the results of a sociological and of a socio-linguistic analysis on a repertoire of 283 judicial sentences and 16,715 newspaper articles on gender crimes (specifically: femicide; sexual violence; domestic violence; women trafficking). The chapters also analyses how national, macro-regional and local Italian press narrates violence against women. The analysis has been conducted on a vast corpus of 16,715 newspaper articles published by fifteen Italian newspapers. 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, affecting the quality of Italian institutions as well as the democratic fibre of the nation.

The volume finally includes a compendium of the best and the worst practices found in the corpuses of sentences and newspapers’ articles and a set of recommendations addressed to the institutional actors and journalists for a correct representation of gender-based violence, free from those stereotypes and prejudices that violate the dignity of male violence’ victims and prevent them from accessing justice.

Flaminia Saccà is Full Professor of Political Sociology at Sapienza University in Rome, Italy, where she teaches "Sociology of Gender Violence" and “Political cultures, gender and power asymmetries” in the MA Course of Gender studies, cultures and policies for media and communication. She is vice-president of the International Sociological Association – Research Committee Sociotechnics – Sociological Practices (ISA RC26), member of the Scientific Committee of the Section of Political Sociology of the Italian Sociological Association and member of the Board of the European Sociological Association – Research Network of Political Sociology (ESA RN32). She is the scientific coordinator of several research projects and networks. Her research interests deal, in particular, with sexist stereotypes and prejudices, with the social representation of gender-based violence and the power relations between genders.