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Migration and sexual abuse in Italy: inside a toxic news cycle

Italian newspapers have abandoned their fact-checking role, giving in to the political exploitation of immigrants – a sensitive issue ahead of next year’s elections.

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 Nicolas Armer/dpa/PA Images.

Photo: Nicolas Armer/DPA/PA Images. All rights reserved.

At the end of the summer, the front pages of Italian newspapers were filled with morbid and tabloid-like accounts of two high-profile cases of sexual violence. The first occurred in Rimini – a city on the Adriatic coast – on the night of 26 August. Four men of foreign origin assaulted and raped a young Polish tourist and later abused a transsexual woman from Peru.