Male Violence Against Women in Journalistic Discourse

Starting from the assumption that, through their narratives, media shape the social discourse on gender-based violence and contribute to create and reinforce stereotypes and prejudice about the role of women in society, this chapter analyses a corpus of 16,715 newspapers’ articles to understand how national, macro-regional, and local Italian press narrates violence against women and the type of messages that derive from it. In particular, it will focus on the five main items of interests emerged from the analysis of the corpus: an unbalanced representation of victims and perpetrators; a minimization of the responsibility of the violence’s perpetrator; a denying of woman’s subjectivity; a normalization of violence; an episodic narrative of male violence.