Conference Program

The increasing use of the term “femicide” in Italian media suggests a growing public recognition of male violence against women. However, naming does not automatically entail structural understanding. This study investigates whether contemporary Italian press has started to move beyond episodic framings of intimate partner violence or continues to reproduce gendered distortions that silence its structural roots.

Although domestic and intimate partner violence is one of the most widespread forms of violence (WHO, 2023; ISTAT, 2025), this phenomenon remains particularly difficult to recognize, even for the victims themselves, since it tends to be socially normalized rather than stigmatized (Gius and Lalli 2014; Hewa 2021; Lalli 2021; Saccà 2021, 2024; Saccà, Carbonari 2025), as we can see from the analysis of the press.

Based on this premise, this study analyzes news articles on intimate partner violence published in 2025 by 26 Italian newspapers (2440), with a specific focus on the femicide of Ilaria Sula (159) to assess whether and to what extent the stereotypical frames that have historically shaped journalistic narratives on the issue are still detectable. The results show that the case of Ilaria Sula received significantly higher media attention compared to other victims, suggesting a hierarchy of visibility. In this case, compared to previous studies (Saccà 2021, 2024; Saccà, Carbonari 2025), explicit victim-blaming is largely absent and the offender is more clearly identified as a “violent man” (e.g., “killer,” “abuser”), whereas exonerating strategies of Himpathy (Manne, 2018, 2020) are less frequent than average. Nevertheless, despite the relatively good practices observed for narrating Ilaria Sula’s case, the dominant narrative structure remains investigative and sensational, foregrounding brutality while backgrounding the broader cultural and structural dynamics of gender inequality.

By exposing the gap between the public naming of femicide and the persistent silencing of structural power relations, the study highlights the democratic implications of media discourse. When gender-based violence is individualized rather than contextualized, the democratic imaginary risks acknowledging the crime while depoliticizing its causes, thereby limiting the development of critical and gender-aware citizenship.