The journalistic representation of gender-based violence is often permeated by sexist stereotypes and prejudices that favor the persistence of a gender order in which men have more social power and control compared to women, and that prevent these latter from breaking free from male violence.
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 Italian newspaper articles on gender-based violence published over three years (2017-2019) and brought to light how the journalistic representation of such violence tends to mitigate men’s responsibility and to empathize with the perpetrators.
In particular, in their narrative, newspapers use to eclipse the male authors of gender-based violence by depicting it as something that happens to women, thus concealing the relation between masculinity and violence. Also, when the violent man does not disappear from the narrative of violence, he is never depicted as completely guilty; his violence tends to be represented as something that he is unable to control or that has been provoked by the female behavior, or as the effect of a quarrel between partners, with the consequence that both of the protagonists are perceived as victims by the readers, shifting the empathy from the victim to the perpetrator.
Starting from these premises, this paper will present the updated data (years 2020-2022) about the journalistic representation of male violence against women, collected by the STEP Observatory on the journalistic representation of male violence against women and will focus in particular on the representation of the offenders. The purpose is to identify elements of continuity and/or discontinuity of the journalistic representation of male violence with respect to the past, and any new forms of empathy towards the violent men vehiculated by stereotyped narrations of violence.

In recent years, media coverage has accustomed the public opinion to an alarming persistence of male violence against women phenomenon, increasingly involving murders of young girls by partners or ex-partners. This trend is confirmed by the recent report published by the Criminal Analysis Service of the Central Criminal Police Directorate of the Italian Ministry of the Interior on crimes recorded in the period 2019-2023 regarding so-called “gender-based violence”. It shows that the data related to the voluntary homicides involving female victims remains basically constant, while there is a slight but steady increase in female victims until 2022, which decreases in 2023.

This scenario has brought up in the public debate the issue about the cultural origin of this phenomenon and the need to put in place targeted interventions by bodies and institutions to counter it. Within this context, the role of the university as an educating community fits fully. Promoting gender equality through an inclusive culture based on diversity among students, researchers and professors, and administrative staff is a key and strategic item in the university’s agenda. But like for all human organizations, gender equality in academia reflects broader changes in society, as well as being directly influenced by several interconnected factors such as norms, values, and beliefs. For these reasons, also in response to the European Commission’s requests announced in 2020, all European university and research institutions were invited to adopt a Gender Equality Plan as a requirement for accessing the “Horizon Europe” funding program from the 2022, outlining several concrete and strategic actions aimed at achieving increased levels of equality in academic communities.

Against this background, the proposal aims at reflecting on the role of universities, as educational institutions but also as subjects capable of providing theoretical and practical tools useful to deconstruct sexist stereotypes and gender prejudices and to fight violence against women. In particular, the main objective of this paper is to discuss the results that emerged from a lexicometric analysis of the Gender Equality Plans drawn up by Italian universities, their first edition since the normative prescription, paid specific attention to the set of measures concerning male violence against women in order to identify common and good practices planned and applied in the Italian Universities.

In early 2023, Meta's independent Oversight Board ruled against the company's approach to moderating female-presenting bodies on Instagram and Facebook, deeming it built on binary gender norms and leading to unfair and subjective content assessments at scale (Oversight Board, 2023). The Board condemned Meta's policies as infringing on users' expression rights and hindering equal treatment of women, transgender, intersex, and non-binary users, urging the company to reform. The public report's critique revealed a pervasive and widely overlooked normative gender bias (Gerrard and Thornham, 2020) within Western-aligned Commercial Content Moderation (CCM), which influences the digital extensively. CCM systems employed by Big Tech (Financial Times, 2018) firms rely on a complex interplay of policymakers, moderators, algorithms, and users, shaping norms amid constant cultural and market fluctuations (Roberts, 2016; Gillespie, 2018; Suzor, 2019). Particularly so, in the regulation of adult nudity and sexual expression, classes of content mostly read as objectionable, inevitably juxtaposing nudity with sex and "sex with harm" (Are and Briggs, 2022).

Through seemingly fickle governance, platforms enforce systemic obscenification of bodies and identities routinely governed as sexual obscenities placed in binary categories of right or wrong expression, morality, and aesthetics. This ongoing investigation delves into the origins, stakeholders, and visual conventions that contribute to the gender-biased treatment and regulation of femininity. It argues that processes of objectification can be just as effective, if not more so, when they lack consistency, as evidenced by the historical censorship of images (El-Mecky, 2024). For instance, while uttering strict bans on sexual content based on the alleged pastoral protection of sensitive viewers, platforms simultaneously promote certain types of (semi-)nudity as desirable content (Kayser-Bril, 2020), remove less commodifiable bodies, and expose children to harmful content making little to no effort to change this (Shahzad, 2023; Stempel et al., 2023). The inconsistent enforcement of guidelines, oscillations between promoting and suppressing similar content, and the opaque nature of CCM processes all contribute to the normalization of femininity as inherently obscene.

Throughout history, feminine bodies have frequently been the focus of visual representation, conforming to standards that cater to an ideal male gaze and regulate both the feminine body and the viewer's perspective (Nead, 1992). Distinct canons of representation coincide with a socially ascribed gender bias turning subjects into more or less appealing sexual objects defined via a heteronormative logic discursively regulating the subject (Butler, 1999) where desire merges with moral superiority and simultaneous debasement of the nude feminine figure. Online, the ambiguity surrounding standards leads to the adoption of counter-speech (self-censoring) practices aimed at preventing the removal of content that simultaneously reinforce the performative heteronormativity inherent in Internet governance. Within tech corporations driven primarily by market logic, this results in the widespread automated performative obscenification of the feminine. This normative bias is often facilitated by visual censoring devices and techniques that inflate the perceived explicitness of content (Schankweiler, 2020). Through extensive genealogical and visual/digital ethnographic analyses, this investigation explores the underlying rationales, actors, and entrenched visual traditions contributing to the biased interpretation of femininity.

The objective of the proposal is to analyze how mafia power legitimizes and supports gender-based violence, based on the assumption of human rights violations as a problem of democracy.Gender violence is substantial and structural to mafia power, useful to the reproduction of dynamics and hierarchies. The paper will share the results of the research on subjectivities when crossed by gender-based violence and mafia violence, in different contexts, with a focus on “Casamonica Group”.The study also aims to contribute to the debate on actions and policies to contrast the mafia system, highlighting the relationships between the social dynamics of gender-based violence and those linked to the specificity of mafia violence, starting from the deconstruction of the imaginary and myths, to build paths linked to the liberation of bodies and the self-determination of subjectivities. The research was conducted with an intersectional approach, creating a specific “matrix of domination” to read and analyze the materials, through judicial sources, life stories and semi-structured interviews.

Gender violence represents a form of victimization, of patriarchal origin, which translates into producing and reproducing structural gender inequalities. It is exercised not only against women but also against lesbians, gays, transgenders, and gender non-conforming people. LGBTQ+ people, in addition to being the object of stereotypes and prejudices, increasingly suffer forms of physical violence (Tomsen Mason 1997; Mason, Tomsen 2001; Meyer 2015; Gahan, Almack 2021; Lund, Burgess, Johnson 2021). In Italy, this phenomenon is constantly increasing, but despite this, policies implemented to address these issues have, so far, been fragmented and rather weak.

The lack of specific laws to protect people from homophobic and transphobic violence in Italy encourages systemic discrimination and contributes to increasing the inequalities experienced by LGBTQ+ people, who are also denied access to resources and, in general, to citizenship rights (Mostaccio, Raffa 2022). For this reason, Italian LGBTQ+ communities have self-organized to create anti-discrimination centers and shelters for young victims of violence. The aim is to organize support and assistance for vulnerable people without social protection. These organizations, providing essential services to sexual minorities, carry out political action that enters the public sphere, helping to fight violence and raise public awareness, reaffirming the need for recognition of the rights of LGBTQ+ people. After a harsh political clash and pressure from social movements, 37 projects were funded across the country in 2022 to create Centers Against Discrimination (CAD) and 2 shelters for victims of violence.

The political role of these activities is at the center of this contribution: we show and present the first results of a research conducted with a qualitative approach (in-depth interviews, interviews with key informants) in a specific case study, a CAD in Reggio Calabria (Southern Italy), a particularly fragile area of the country from a political and economic point of view.

Since the rates of violence, alone, do not explain the violent experiences suffered by LGBTQ+ people (Ahmed,Jindasurat 2014; Herek 2009), the objective of this research is to analyze the actions and working methods of this organization to verify the political role and social impacts on the territory; identify how these activities contribute to the construction of a public sphere capable of unveiling asymmetric power relations and, finally, highlight appropriate policy indications to reduce gender inequalities.

This work represents the first step for a subsequent comparison with other case studies in Italy and Europe.