Skip to content

Monsters, jealousy and “sick love” — how the Italian media covers violence against women

Statistics give partial pictures of gender-based violence in Italy – but the language used to cover such violence can be even more misleading.

Published:

"The man who beat women." La Iene television show, 15 November 2016. Italia Uno.

Although in Italy the mainstream media talks about violence against women as an emergency, too often the caution and care that should be applied to reporting on such a critical issue is lacking.

For one, newspapers and broadcasters often address this violence with numbers and statistics that fail to fully capture the problem – there is no official data on femicides in Italy, for example.