Stereotypes and prejudices in the legal representation of violence against women. A socio-cultural analysis of the judgments in the Italian courts

The paper presents data from the «STEP - Stereotype and Prejudice. For a Cultural Change in Gender Representation in the Judiciary, Law Enforcement and Media Reporting» research. The research has been coordinated by Professor Flaminia Saccà and financed by the Italian Presidency of the Council of Ministers - Department for Equal Opportunities. The research considered 5 types of violence against women – domestic violence; sexual violence; murder/femicide; human trafficking; stalking – in the context of two linguistic domains: legal language, with the analysis of 283 sentences issued by Italian criminal courts and the language of the media, through the analysis of over sixteen thousand articles published between 2017 and 2019 in the main national and local newspapers . In this article, we will focus our attention on the analysis of legal language. The analysis is based on a corpus of judgments consisting of four different collections. Three of these were included in the analysis through the reports of professionals, two judges and a lawyer, with a long experience in the legal treatment of violence against women, and members of the scientific council of the project. To these three qualitative repertoires, it is added a fourth database of judgments built directly by the UNITUS research team through access to the Juris Data-De Jure and Cedam Utet Ipsoa digital archives. The analysis was conducted through human content analysis methodology