The pack of the “Green Park”. Rhetorics and stereotypes in the press representation of a gang rape case

Abstract

This paper examines media representations of the gang rapes perpetrated in Caivano, a town in the Neapolitan hinterland, involving two young victims aged 10 and 12 and nine aggressors, seven of whom were minors. Through a mixed methods content analysis of a corpus of 110 articles from 15 Italian newspapers, the work investigates how the narrative surrounding the case was constructed, focusing on issues of secondary victimization and concealment of male responsibility. The findings reveal a systematic use of the “periphery rhetoric” to obscure the perpetrators’ accountability and to deflect attention from the gendered dimensions of the violence, ultimately depoliticizing it.