Conference Program

Over the past decades, male violence against women has gained increasing visibility in the public sphere and in media discourse. In this context, the media, and the press in particular, play a crucial role in the social construction of the phenomenon, shaping public opinion through specific narrative, lexical, and interpretative choices. However, research on media representation of gender-based violence has shown that the journalistic narratives of such violence are often permeated by stereotypes and distortions that tend to individualize episodes of violence, re-victimize women, and partially absolve violence perpetrators.

The here proposed contribution analyzes how male violence against women and its protagonists — victims and perpetrators — are represented in crime reporting in newspapers published in Rome. The analysis is based on a corpus of 2,037 articles published in 2024 and 2025 by eight newspapers based in Rome. The study combines corpus-assisted analysis using an ad hoc artificial intelligence tool with lexicometric methods and qualitative content analysis in order to identify recurring linguistic patterns and discursive strategies in journalistic narratives about gender-based violence.

The findings show that the Roman press reproduces several dynamics already highlighted in international studies: the strong centrality of female figures in news narratives, accompanied by the relative concealment of male perpetrators; the use of discursive strategies such as linguistic avoidance and euphemization that tend to obscure male responsibility; the portrayal of victims primarily through categories of vulnerability and passivity; and, simultaneously, the representation of perpetrators through narratives that oscillate between moral condemnation and mitigation of perpetrators' responsibility grounded in biographical, psychological, or social explanations. The analysis also highlights the emphasis placed on the cultural and geographical origin of perpetrators and the role of social hierarchies in shaping empathy and stigma toward the actors involved in cases of violence.

Overall, the study shows how these discursive practices contribute to producing a narrative that, while morally condemning violence, still struggles to fully acknowledge its structural and gendered nature. This contribution aims to reflect on the role of the press in reproducing or challenging gender stereotypes and to emphasize the need to promote greater social responsibility in journalistic reporting on violence against women.