This work means to provide a logical and methodological critic to the article by Macrì P.G. et. al. (2012), “Indagine conoscitiva sulla violenza verso il maschile”, published in “Rivista di Criminologia, Vittimologia e Sicurezza”, Vol. VI, N. 3, September-Dicember 2012, 30, which attempts to investigate women’s violence against men.
Francesco Iovine
The authors, starting from ideological premises according to which the Italian culture would “normalize” public violence against men, report the results of an – in many aspects – invalid questionnaire, yet claiming to fulfill projections of results on a national scale.
From these premises, this paper aims to analyze all problematic aspects through a deconstruction on different levels – epistemological, theoretical, methodological, and bibliographic. The starting point will be an analysis of language employed by the authors, which appears strikingly ideological and far from the properness of form a scientific publication would require.
The absence of any theory supporting the authors and authoresses’ petitio principii is furtherly made worse by the missing references to the topic’s literature or any study or data gathering in the field. The substantial scientific unreliability of such questionnaire, the items of which investigate the single act in a generic way and rule out all variables linked to the episode’s context, to the author’s own characteristics, to the consequences of violence and of the victim’s behaviour, to relations with the forces of law and to the history of violence, will be discussed in detail.
Further object of discussion will be the participation in such a questionnaire of male subjects reached through the subscription to a newsletter of a network of websites revolving around a distinguishably misogynous blog (Centro Documentazione Violenza Donne) and unknown associations. The discussion on the point of non-representativeness of such a sample selection and the limits of such a bibliography will be further elements supporting the thesis of the poor validity of the whole Indagine.
Keywords: gender symmetry, gender violence, misogyny.
