“Mine or No One Else’s”: An analysis of the representations of femi(ni)cide in Italian news reporting

Over the past few years, we have witnessed a crescendo of femi(ni)cides in the news. With the onset of the pandemic, the UN has defined this escalation as ‘a Shadow Pandemic’ (UN Women, 2020). While something is being done at the institutional level, many news reports perpetuate the framing of femi(ni)cide as a set of isolated cases, fueled by jealousy or temporary insanity, ignoring its socio-cultural origins. This is the case of Italy, which to date is the first and only European country to which the UN has addressed specific warnings on the phenomenon (Manjoo, 2012). Against this background, the present study examines how femi(ni)cide is framed in Italian news coverage, through a corpus retrieved from the newspaper La Repubblica’s online section ‘Osservatorio Femminicidio’ (2021). Drawing upon Bacchi’s (2009) “What’s the Problem Represented to Be” approach, the study analyses the discursive patterns used to frame femi(ni)cides, their implicatures, wording, and negative effects, to highlight what aspects are left unchallenged and what can be done to change the typical news reporting representations of femi(ni)cides in Italy.