Gender-based Violence and Outreach News: Limits or Opportunities?

Considering the role of the media in representing the theme of gender-based violence in the public debate, the V.A.R.CO. (Violence against Women: Networked Actions to Prevent and Combat) project of the Department of Culture, Politics and Society (University of Turin, Italy) has been focusing ‒ in a research on Piedmont, funded by the CRT Foundation ‒ on the role of local media in building good practices and promoting actions against gender-based violence. One of the objectives was to monitor the local information media and their connections with the territory, in order to understand the limits and potential of proximal information, which is fundamental to stimulate and grow the debate also in the territory and also to give visibility to the subjects that work in the fight against gender violence. Focusing on 2020 ‒ a year that, with the pandemic crisis, has become relevant also for the debate on gender- based violence, due to the systemic fragility of social actions and approches ‒ we tried to understand how local information is still a resource of the complex territorial network and how it can influence public decisions at various levels. The objective of the research was achieved through the analysis of the coverage of some main local media and the way they selected and dealt with the topic of gender-based violence in all its specificities (news and public debate). This analysis was complemented by focus groups with journalists working in local editorial offices. The hypotheses were different. First: to find confirmation that crime news remains the mains genre. The second: to verify the use of more inclusive approaches by the media and to avoid the genderization of the topic. Finally, despite the critical aspects, the aim is to demonstrate that local information is better able to establish direct links between the subjects dealing with the issue and to create (or not) synergy between institutions and citizenship. The expected results are that local information, between identity and resource crises, still represents a cognitive resource able to build opinion from below, especially for action networks.