Semantics of Sexual Violence: The “Imperfect Victims” in the Italian Media

Starting from an etymological analysis of rape in the Indo-European language family, we want to trace the historical and semantic roots of this lexeme, in order to review its semantic and pragmatic development in the perception of Italian speakers. Our aim is to read and understand the rape victim socio-cultural stigma in collective imagination. It is therefore possible to reconstruct the lexical, socio-semiotic, and narrative domain anticipating the phenomenology of victim blaming, which characterizes the media narratives of sexual violence. The victimological profile, socially expected and culturally accepted, seems to support the original semantic connotation of the Latin word stuprum, that is “corruption of virginity”, “contamination of purity”. Many typical mainstream discourses examined, through special “gender lenses”, provide portraits of imperfect, ambiguous, unreliable victims because they are deemed guilty of not being holy enough.

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