This work aims to provide a tool to analyze social representations of gender-based violence, an issue that is receiving increasing media attention in recent years. Focusing on the Italian case, the re- search questions we try to answer are: 1) How is gender-based violence represented in the Italian press? 2) How does Italian press represent the women victims of gender-based violence and the men authors of such violence? Particularly, we try to understand how press contributes to the social discourse on gender-based violence and what role it plays in the perpetuation of a social structure based on unequal power relations between genders.The starting hypothesis is that the press can contributes to create and reinforce stereotypes and prejudices about the role of women in society, thus favoring the persistence of those relations of material and symbolic domination, that still too often lead to gender-based violence.Our work is based on the data collected within the research project STEP – Stereotypes and prejudice. Toward a cultural change in gender representation in judicial, law enforcement and media narrative. It relies on the analysis of a corpus containing more than 16,000 articles published in Italian newspapers in the period between the 1st of January 2017 and the 31st December 2019, dealing with the issue of gender-based violence and with the crimes connected to it: domestic violence, rape, femicide, stalking, women trafficking.

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The social representation of gender-based violence constitutes a subject of increasing interest by researchers in many sub-disciplinary areas of sociology. The growing interest of social scientists in this topic is due to the crucial role of culturally transmitted social mechanisms, that are reflected in the language through which institutions and social actors represent male violence against women, thus reproducing the conditions underlying it. Every social phenomenon lies in its narrative, in the way it is constructed and, in the language chosen to represent it. Therefore, narrative constitutes a fundamental heuristic and hermeneutical instrument through which it is possible to give meaning to a social phenomenon. Nevertheless, it often happens that third people, institutions, or various social actors construct narrative of social phenomena, without involving the people that experienced it. This happens with the narration of gender-based violence that all too often comes from external social actors, while the women who are protagonists – against their will –of the episodes of violence, are excluded from the construction of the social representation of what they suffered. This work, after briefly illustrating the main characteristics of the dominant social representation of male violence against women, proposes a theoretical reflection on the importance of women first-person narrative, as a tool for deconstructing the distorted social representation of gender-based violence that contributes to the perpetuation of its normalization, to the “de-responsibilization” of its perpetrator and of the sexist prejudices against women victims of such violence.

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