Social representations of feminicide in college students and in written mediaSocial Representations; Feminicide; Death of women; Violence against women
Through a historical analysis we can note the growing discussion regarding the rights and duties of the subject as a social being outlined from a gender perspective. Although the Brazilian Constitution establishes that all citizens have the same rights and duties, there is a different social representation for men and women, which occurs through both psychological violence and physical aggression against women, with the apex of feminicide. Femicide is the violent death of women motivated by gender issues, the result of an anti-female sexist terror driven by the ownership, hatred and contempt of the female figure. Femicide has a political dimension to the extent that the state allows these deaths to continue, through its failure to investigate the case, identify and hold criminals accountable. Within this scenario, the theory of social representations, created by Serge Moscovici, in order to investigate how we create and share concepts and ideas in our mind and what their correspondence with reality. Social representations could be described as the reconstruction of the real that concerns groups with the ability to resignify a social object. When shared by a group of people, they become Social Representations, that is, the implicit theories and preconceptions that shape the data coming from the outside world, making a common sense knowledge of a given society. They are passed through communication systems, which are based on the culture of a people. The individuals assimilate the information passed by this system that happens in three instances of the press, they would be: diffusion, propagation and propaganda. The research aimed to identify the social representations of femicide among college students and the media. Method: A questionnaire was applied to 200 university students, 100 female and 100 male, containing open and closed questions associated with a word-free evocation task using the term “femicide”. The open questions were analyzed through content analysis, the closed questions through the SPSS software, and the free evocation task with the help of the EVOC software. The study pointed to a probable central core of feminicide anchored in a patriarchal worldview that justifies gender inequality and associated violence. Social representations about femicide can help public policies aimed at addressing violence against women, promoting gender education so that we can combat cases of murder of women in Brazil and around the world.