Gendered Domestic Violence and Abuse in Popular Culture

Shulamit Ramon, Michele Lloyd, Bridget Penhale

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781838677831
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

As binge-watching and streaming lead to increasing amounts of content and screen time, understanding how domestic violence and abuse is portrayed in popular culture and its impact on DVA in our society is more important than ever. Amid current international attention on sexual harassment, abuse and exploitation initiated by the #MeToo movement, this collection demonstrates how networked communication is influencing activism, both online and in the real-world.
The term gendered DVA recognises the wider gender inequality underpinning DVA, and intersecting inequalities such as race, social class, sexuality, age and disability. International contributors from Europe, the USA and Australia examine how DVA is represented in different media forms comprising film, television, newspapers, digital and social media, and TED lectures. The collection examines intimate partner abuse, child abuse, grooming and sexual exploitation, elder abuse and neglect, and abuse in LGBT relationships. Authors also analyse policy changes in relation to DVA, both progressive and regressive, together with topics such as moral panic in the media and trial by media.
An in-depth and wide-ranging resource, this collection will be a valuable text for health and social care professionals, researchers, academics, undergraduate and postgraduate students, and people with lived experience of DVA.

Chapter 1

Death Foretold: A Multiperspective Study of Domestic Violence in an Italian Town

Elena Allegri

Abstract

In the contemporary media landscape, gender violence has achieved great visibility. However, the media still struggle to represent the complexity of violence perpetrated by men against women in its various forms – femicide, domestic violence (DV), intimate partner violence and violence against women. The narratives that represent such violence as an expression of individual deviance or as a crime of passion are still the most widespread both in fictional and factual products. This chapter will look at a case study by applying a multiperspective methodology of femicide and DV in an Italian town. In particular, the exemplary case study presented here was constructed by analysing newspaper articles, social networks and one television broadcast. The first part of the chapter is dedicated to the analysis of literature on femicide, DV and gender violence in relation to studies and research on media coverage, with particular reference to Italian studies. The second part presents the methodology applied in the research. The third part presents the outcomes regarding the analysis of the narrative, highlighting the frames that characterise it. Finally, the fourth part shows the conclusion that can be derived.

Keywords: Femicide; domestic violence; intimate partner violence; Italian newspapers; media coverage; media discourse

Introduction

Quoting García Marquez's famous novel, Crónica de una muerte anunciada (1981) (Chronicle of a Death Foretold), the title of this chapter refers to a sentence pronounced by Teresa, Rosy Bonanno's mother, the woman killed on 10 July 2013 in a town near Palermo, Sicily, by her ex-husband Benedetto Conti: ‘it's a death foretold. We knew it would end up this way!’ (Il Giornale, 11/07/2013), the topic of the multiperspective study included in this volume.

All over the world, many cases of femicide can be considered chronicles of deaths foretold. They are the inescapable conclusions of ‘violent intimate relationships’, characterised by an escalation of threats, assaults, abuse, stalking and other forms of violence systematically perpetrated by men over time. This is what a 2013 analysis carried out by the World Health Organization with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the South African Medical Research Council showed, using existing data from over 80 countries. It was found that worldwide as many as 58% of femicide are committed by a male intimate partner. One in three or 35% of women have experienced physical and/or sexual violence by an intimate partner or by a nonpartner (WHO, 2013).

Domestic violence (DV), as well as femicide, can be considered a transversal phenomenon that exists in all countries and is common to all cultures, class, ethnic groups, education, income levels and age groups (Corradi & Stöckl, 2016; Romito, 2005). In most cases, it is carried out by men against their women partners, as shown by statistical data at both international and national (Italian) levels (Gartner & Jung, 2014). As far as Italy is concerned, the most recent EURES (Istituto di Ricerche Economiche e Sociali (Institute of Economics and Social research)) report, “Homicide within the household”, shows that in 2018, 163 out of 329 victims of murder were killed in their household. The percentage, amounting to 49.5% of murders, is the highest ever. Of these 163 victims, 109 were women (67%) compared to 54 men (33%). The abovementioned data sound even more tragic considering that 2018 counted 130 female victims in Italy. This means that 83.4% of the women killed in Italy died at the hands of a family member, a partner or a former partner.

In the contemporary media landscape, femicide and gender-based violence have reached growing visibility. Within media content, several acronyms such as intimate partner violence (IPV) and violence against women (VAW) have been used interchangeably with DV (Berrios & Grady, 1991). Not only is this a sign of ambivalence in the media but also of the need to find agreements within the international debate. As for the use of the term femicide, Weil (2018) indicates that Diana Russell first used the term in 1976 within a broader critical feminist framework during the proceedings of the first International Tribunal on Crimes against Women, in Brussels, Belgium. After the initial momentum, when femicide was defined as a misogynist crime (Radford & Russell, 1992), the designation fell into partial disuse. Meantime, the study of femicide evolved and was adapted by international scholars, including Campbell in the United States (Campbell et al., 2003), Dobash and Dobash in the United Kingdom (Dobash & Dobash, 1998) and Fregoso and Bejarano in Latin America (2013). Femicide was translated into feminicidio by the Mexican feminist Lagarde y de los Rios (2008). Today, scholars use the terms femicide and feminicidio interchangeably (Grzyb & Hernandez, 2015; Weil, Corradi, & Naudi, 2018). In 2008, Spinelli authored a book titled Femminicidio (2008) showing how different definitions lead to very different political actions. In 2013, the Accademia della Crusca, a prestigious institution of scholars and experts in linguistics and philology of the Italian language, defined the neologism ‘femicide’, distinguishing it from ‘murder’, as ‘something that fits within a cultural vision that sees the female […] despised and miserable’ (2013). Thus, the term entered the common vocabulary.

The United Nations defines VAW as ‘any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual, or mental harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life’ (Spinelli, 2011; United Nations, 1993; UN HCR UN Human Rights Council, 2011, 2012, p. 8).

In Italy, femicide and VAW enjoy great media visibility, mainly in newspapers, newscasts and TV programmes. In newspapers, VAW, both lethal and nonlethal, is narrated with emphasis and sensationalism. On television, it is tackled mostly in afternoon TV programmes that combine and intertwine typical elements, like information genre (using a factual language based on information), with others dealing with entertainment (using a fictional language based on invention): we talk about infotainment (Osservatorio di Pavia [Observatory of Pavia ], 2014). In order to raise readers' and public opinion's interest, these TV programmes present DV, VAW or femicide as sensational events, trivialised to the point that a talk show host claimed that a man set fire to his partner ‘because he loved her too much’ in front of millions of viewers and during the protected time slot.

Despite the stubborn and systematic contribution of feminist political movements in order to raise awareness of VAW – and the fact that the term ‘gender-based violence’ is now commonly used is an important result – Italian public opinion still considers these crimes a fatality or even the result of an isolated and temporary burst of rage. This representation also appears in media coverage and other forms of popular culture, such as in social networking sites, films, music and video games (Giomi & Magaraggia, 2017; Simpson Beck, Boys, Rose, & Beck, 2012).

The media have long assumed a key role both for the massive dissemination of texts and images in contemporary culture and for their ability to create and condense perceptions, codes of social behaviour and dominant representations within a society. Through the process of codification, the media create visual and symbolic stereotypes of great impact (Abruzzese & Dal Lago, 1999). In this perspective, media texts become objects of circular communication: they offer information and multiply representations from the general to the particular and vice versa. They activate connections between the social and the individual dimension, and they contain and synthesise instances, intentions and individual projections, both material and symbolic, expressed both by those who use them and by those who produce them (Allegri, 2006; Morcellini & Fatelli, 2000).

Studying the representations of violence – both lethal and nonlethal cases – against women requires a careful analysis of the media documents. According to Altheide, these can be defined as ‘any symbolic representation that can be recorded or retrieved for analysis’ (1996, p. 6). However, it also means tracing the different underlying frames that build the sense of the narrative proposed in different contexts: daily newspapers, social networking sites, social media and others.

The notion of frame (Goffman, 1974) is useful to explain the role played by the media in the social construction of reality, its actors, phenomena and processes. The frame of a theme is the key to its interpretation, its interpretative framework: it represents the way in which a means of communication gives the theme a meaning and a certain point of view.

Framing establishes the elements (events, aspects, characters, institutions and so on) that will be included in the story as well as the way they will be intertwined. What are the frames suggested by the media? What are the interpretative frames applied for the study of and research on the representations of DV in the media?

This chapter will examine the representations of DV, in close relation with those regarding femicide, applied to a specific case, namely that of Rosy Bonanno, which took place in an Italian town. It is a multi-perspective study in that it examines the story as it was told by newspapers, television broadcasts and social networking sites, focussing on its narrative construction and comparing it with the interpretations of the phenomenon proposed by the scientific literature and statistics. The main hypothesis underlying this study concerns the power and ability of the press and of the media to influence the construction and interpretation of a specific social issue (Blumer, 1971; Custers & Van den Bulck, 2013; Giomi, 2010; Lalli & Gius, 2016; Moscovici, 1984; Richards, Gillespie, & Smith, 2011), increasing or decreasing its visibility within the public arena, through the construction and diffusion of representations and frames, that is to say the specific ways of explaining it (Giomi, 2019; Gius & Lalli, 2014).

The first part of the chapter is dedicated to the analysis of literature on femicide, DV and gender violence in relation to studies and research on media coverage, with particular reference to Italian studies. The second part presents the methodology applied in the multi-perspective study research. The third part presents the outcomes regarding the analysis of the narrative, highlighting the frames that characterise it. Finally, the fourth part shows the conclusion that can be derived from the case study.

Literature Analysis: Femicide and DV in the Italian Media and Press

The theoretical perspective most widely applied today in the literature is the sociocultural one and, in particular, social representations (Moscovici, 1961, 1984, 2005), constructivism, which considers ‘reality’ and knowledge as incessantly (re)produced through social and communicative interactions (Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Goffman, 1959), and the gender perspective (Giomi & Magaraggia, 2017; Gius & Lalli, 2014 among others). Sociocultural approaches highlight the influence of social norms, values and cultural beliefs that are widespread in a given society and which are essential to researching femicide because analysing sociocultural factors relates to IPV and femicide (Weil, Corradi, & Naudi, 2018). All these theories are often intertwined (Guba & Lincoln, 1994). As Lalli and Gius (2016) point out, a fact, and the more general underlying problem, must be presented as deserving of both attention and public interest. It must be ‘newsworthy’ in order to be told by the press and by the media, which, in fact, select what is considered relevant for public discussion and dissemination. Moreover, the journalistic narrative, in whatever form it takes, participates in the construction of frames of meaning that make the ‘facts’ comprehensible to the public. This is done through a narrative, that is, ‘anchorage’, and a concrete representation, that is, ‘objectification’ to specific aspects that are linked to what is supposed to be shared in the common sense of the readers and the public more generally (Moscovici, 2005). The theoretical perspective underlying the abovementioned aspects is that of social representations. The theory of social representations was conceived to study the relationship between science and common sense. Beginning with Durkheim's studies (1898) on collective representations, this theory was further explored by Moscovici in his works (1961, 1984), where he defined them as naive theories. He illustrated the idea of a contextualised representation, construed through interindividual interactions. Such representation allows the social actor to adapt to the reality of the moment. Such reality conveys the definition of the groups who build it. The social representations are laboratories of contemporary culture, although they are not universally shared. Everyday life – the area in which media and newspapers operate – can be understood as a social construct determined by a continuous exchange between individual and collective definitions within a social system. Individuals plan their actions and negotiate them with those of others according to how the situation is defined, i.e., according to the way they represent the context of their actions and discursive practices both to themselves and to others (Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Goffman, 1959).

From Crime of Honour to a Social Problem?

Examining VAW and DV, their newsworthiness appears to be connected to two different frames: they are either a criminal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Editor
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Authors
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue Gendered Domestic Violence and Abuse, Popular Culture and the Digital Revolution
• Chapter 1 Death Foretold: A Multiperspective Study of Domestic Violence in an Italian Town
• Chapter 2 Examining Domestic Violence and Abuse in Mainstream and Social Media: Representations and Responses
• Chapter 3 Hollywood and Beyond: Rescreening Domestic Violence
• Chapter 4 Leslie Morgan Steiner: An Analysis of TED Lectures on Domestic Violence by Men Towards Women
• Chapter 5 The Australian Media and Child Abuse
• Chapter 6 Elder Abuse and Media Representation of Abuse in Family Settings
• Chapter 7 News Media Representation of Domestic Violence Victims and Perpetrators: Focus on Gender and Sexual Orientation in International Literature
• Chapter 8 Moral Panic in the Media: Scapegoating South Asian Men in Cases of Sexual Exploitation and Grooming
• Chapter 9 ‘Stories Not Bouquets!’: The #Metoo campaign in Slovenia and Its Social Consequences
• Epilogue Gendered Domestic Violence and Abuse in Popular Culture: Where We Are and Where We Would Like to Be
• Index