She asked it: an understand of the portrayal of gender-based violence events by the Italian media
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2021-08-03
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en
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Abstract
Gender-based violence is a plague to eradicate, deeply rooted in the cultures, societies and minds of individuals. As a profoundly sexist and patriarchal society, Italy still struggles not only with defeating, but rather with recognising the embedded issue, and with the Covid-19 crisis this problem emerged even more obviously. The media, with the power to decide what information is worth disseminating, works as a mirror in society thus both projecting and reinforcing structural gender inequality in Italy. Through a moderate feminist perspective, a content analysis research was conducted investigating two main Italian newspapers in their digital forms - Il Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica -, in order to understand how the gender-based violence issue is portrayed by the Italian media. The analysis was conducted in two different timeframes, during the Weinstein case which pushed the world to open its eyes towards gender-based violence in Western societies, and during the Covid-19 crisis. Two competitive theories were used in this research: the socio-cultural approach and the psycho-individualistic approach. Although, to some extent the findings were unexpectedly in contrast with the expectations of this research - as the newspapers were expected to align more with the psycho-individualistic approach -, in an attempt to analyse how gender-based violence is portrayed by the Italian media, more research on the broad issues of gender inequality and gender-based violence in Italy is highly recommended to be pursued.
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen