Dentro il processo: narrazioni, numeri e spazi del femminicidio nel discorso giudiziario

The essay describes the first results of a scientific research on the social representations of femicide in the Italian juridical documents. The study’s theoretical frame analyses the use of the term femicide through the lens of the normative process, by examining its social meanings and questioning both its political and economic anchoring. The analysis starts from the notions of violence, gender and corporeity and it later focuses on the problems arising from the use of the term femicide in the contexts of law and jurisprudence, due to its translation into different types of offence.The theme of power and gender inequality is analysed using the model of the “juridical field”. The outcomes of this empirical research, conducted through both qualitative and quantitative methods, lead, in this perspective, to a series of reflections. As for the part regarding quantitative data, the project team used a corpus of 370 femicide sentences issued in Italy between 2010 and 2016. The qualitative data was collected by interviewing key informants and analysing the narrations of violence against women in selected sentences. The study confirms the peculiarity of the judicial narration in the case femicide. The “discourse” produced inside the “juridical field” reveals to be a rich source for getting to know a phaenomenon that still lacks structural data.