Beyond Headlines: A Corpus of Femicides News Coverage in Italian Newspapers
Authors: Eleonora Cappuccio, Benedetta Muscato, Laura Pollacci, Marta Marchiori Manerba, Clara Punzi, Chandana Sree Mala, Margherita Lalli, Gizem Gezici, Michela Natilli, Fosca Giannotti (Università di Pisa, CNR-ISTI, Università di Bari Aldo Moro, Scuola Normale Superiore, 2024)
Topic: Lexical and Semantic Resources and Analysis

Abstract
How newspapers cover news significantly impacts how facts are understood, perceived, and processed by the public. This is especially crucial when serious crimes are reported, e.g., in the case of femicides, where the description of the perpetrator and the victim builds a strong, often polarized opinion of this severe societal issue. This paper presents \FMNews, a new dataset of articles reporting femicides extracted from Italian newspapers. Our core contribution aims to promote the development of a deeper framing and awareness of the phenomenon through an original resource available and accessible to the research community, facilitating further analyses on the topic. The paper also provides a preliminary study of the resulting collection through several example use cases and scenarios.

Introduction
How newspapers and journalists present news plays a crucial role in shaping public understanding and perception of information. This is especially important when reporting serious crimes, such as femicides, where descriptions of the perpetrator and victim can create polarized opinions influencing readers' perceptions and interpretations of the event. According to Bouzerdan (2018), news media often report incidents of women’s homicides in a sensationalised manner, treating these crimes as isolated events rather than situating them within the bigger framework of violence against women. This narrative defies the global demands of human rights organisations to acknowledge and address this phenomenon as demanded by its intricate dynamics. Numerous countries have followed such recommendations only partially through the formal adoption of specific terminology such as femicide and feminicide in legal frameworks and public discourse. The two terms have related but distinct nuances of meaning. Femicide, a criminological concept initially coined in English by the feminist criminologist Diana H. Russell (Radford and Russell, 1992), denotes the murder of women by males due to their gender. Successively, the term femicide, translated in Castilian as femicidio or feminicide by the anthropologist Marcela Lagarde to attract political attention to the dire situation faced by women in Mexico (Lagarde, 2006), has gained global traction with varying interpretations. Yet, it consistently denotes a patriarchal impetus behind homicides and other forms of male violence against women, primarily emphasizing the sociological dimensions of abuse and the socio-political ramifications of the phenomenon. In the Italian language, the term femminicidio has been almost exclusively adopted, as evidenced by a Google Trends analysis comparing the search terms "femicidio" and "femminicidio" to queries regarding "femicide." An analysis of the phenomenon of femicide in the Italian context and, in particular, a linguistic investigation of it, are particularly relevant. Feminicide, a term used by the feminist movement in Italy since 2005, gained prominence in the media in 2011, especially thanks to the works of Barbara Spinelli (Spinelli, 2008). The CEDAW Committee, based on data from the Shadow Report on the Implementation of CEDAW in Italy, addressed recommendations to the Italian government on feminicide in its Concluding Observations. This was the first time the committee addressed a European state on feminicide, a category previously reserved for warnings to Central American countries. The challenges in accurately contextualising feminicide in Italy also stem from a prolonged absence of official data, resulting in sensationalism and the perception of a dramatic rise in the crime. This may induce an emergency narrative that obscures the inherent structural dimensions of the phenomenon, thereby undermining the very essence of the term (Spinelli, 2012). Media interpretations are essential for shaping a shared understanding across a vast audience, such as a whole country; hence, the examination of media discourse emerges as a significant analytical instrument on top of statistical evaluation of femicide data to understand the achievements and directions of state intervention towards the substantial granting of women's right to life (Abis, 2016). In this regard, Aldrete (2023) showed that there is a large body of empirical studies on femicide discourse across different socio-cultural contexts, which often justify the perpetrator's actions. Given the complexity of the phenomenon, a comprehensive investigation could be achieved by integrating media analysis with external data, such as demographics and current events, blending together researchers from different fields like computer science, social sciences, and complex systems science. The lack of accessible and relevant data specific to socio-cultural contexts where femicide is notably prevalent, such as in Italy, makes the task particularly challenging (Forciniti, 2023). This paper presents \FMNews, a new dataset of articles reporting femicides extracted from Italian newspapers. We conduct a preliminary analysis of the resulting collection through several example use cases and scenarios. The primary contribution is to deepen understanding and awareness of femicide from a socio-technical perspective. We seek to examine how prominent Italian news sources report on the issue in connection to the shaping of public perception, while also offering an innovative and accessible resource to facilitate future investigation within the research community. Furthermore, this study was designed to enable a multifaceted investigation covering the following three dimensions: Geographical, with the aim to explore potential variations in framing between local and national media outlets. Previous research has shown that Italian local daily newspapers often suppress the agency of the perpetrator, portraying the events as mere occurrences. We selected newspapers reporting news at both the national (e.g., Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica, La Stampa, Il Fatto Quotidiano, Il Giornale, and Il Post) and local levels, with local editions spanning across the whole Italian territory. Political, ensured by choosing national newspapers with varying political leanings. Temporal, where the time frame of national newspapers extends from November 2009 to February 2024, whilst that of the local ones ranges from November 2010 to February 2024.

Conclusion
In this contribution, we provided a novel dataset concerning the critical issue of femicide in Italy. Considering the absence of resources for conducting in-depth analyses on the subject, our intent was to bridge this gap and provide an original perspective for understanding and raising awareness about this severe phenomenon. As suggested by AUTHOR proposing a contribution within the Machine Learning domain responsibly and consciously means foremost acknowledging our own biases. In particular, we are referring to both the newspaper selection and choice of the terms used to extract the data, that certainly shaped the results (all design choices are justified in detail in Section dataset. A future outlook concerns the investigation of how both victims and perpetrators are framed from a linguistic perspective. Further analyses could regard identifying temporal and geographical patterns arising from media attention manifested through the coverage of femicides and comparing the framing of these events with the political leaning of the respective newspapers.