Universities against gender-based violence: an analysis of the Gender Equality Plans

In recent years, media coverage has accustomed the public opinion to an alarming persistence of male violence against women phenomenon, increasingly involving murders of young girls by partners or ex-partners. This trend is confirmed by the recent report published by the Criminal Analysis Service of the Central Criminal Police Directorate of the Italian Ministry of the Interior on crimes recorded in the period 2019-2023 regarding so-called “genderbased violence”. It shows that the data related to the voluntary homicides involving female victims remains basically constant, while there is a slight but steady increase in female victims until 2022, which decreases in 2023. This scenario has brought up in the public debate the issue about the cultural origin of this phenomenon and the need to put in place targeted interventions by bodies and institutions to counter it. Within this context, the role of the university as an educating community fits fully. Promoting gender equality through an inclusive culture based on diversity among students, researchers and professors, and administrative staff is a key and strategic item in the university’s agenda. But like for all human organizations, gender equality in academia reflects broader changes in society, as well as being directly influenced by several interconnected factors such as norms, values, and beliefs. For these reasons, also in response to the European Commission’s requests announced in 2020, all European university and research institutions were invited to adopt a Gender Equality Plan as a requirement for accessing the “Horizon Europe” funding program from the 2022, outlining several concrete and strategic actions aimed at achieving increased levels of equality in academic communities. Against this background, the proposal aims at reflecting on the role of universities, as educational institutions but also as subjects capable of providing theoretical and practical tools useful to deconstruct sexist stereotypes and gender prejudices and to fight violence against women. In particular, the main objective of this paper is to discuss the results that emerged from a lexicometric analysis of the Gender Equality Plans drawn up by Italian universities, their first edition since the normative prescription, paid specific attention to the set of measures concerning male violence against women in order to identify common and good practices planned and applied in the Italian Universities.