Newspaper coverage of intimate femicide in Italy

Abstract

The study sought to analyse how Italian newspapers portrayed intimate partner femicides (IPFs) in 2013, focusing on the three elements that make domestic violence media frames: victim blaming language, sources of information and context of the IPF. The study’s aim was to verify whether the existing research findings, usually referring to American news media, apply to Italian newspapers as well; therefore, a summative content analysis, which begins with keywords or items derived from the literature, was conducted. The analysis of the portrayal of the victim and the perpetrator and the attribution of blame showed that victim blaming tactics were heavily used in the sample; also, six tactics which were not identified by previous research were found. The investigation of the sources cited in the articles demonstrated that personal sources were used more often than public sources and that Facebook and politicians, which were not found in previous studies, were also mentioned. The analysis of the context of the IPFs revealed that most of the articles did not portray the IPF within the problem of DV. Finally, the comparisons between national and local newspapers showed that national articles tended to be less victim blaming, to use public sources more often and to portray the IPF within a DV context more frequently than local articles. To sum up, the study proved that existing research findings about DV media frames cannot completely be applied to Italian newspapers.