PERCHÉ CONTRARE I FEMMINICIDI È UN ATTO POLITICO

In Italy, there is still no official record of feminicides, and the way women's murders are classified often reflects a system that downplays gender-based violence. Who decides what gets counted? And who holds the power to dismiss what the numbers really mean?

In this book Donata Columbro dismantles the myth of statistical neutrality and shows how counting feminicides is, in itself, a form of resistance and a matter of power.

Drawing from history, investigative journalism, and activism, Columbro examines how feminicides are tracked in official data and what that data reveals about institutional attitudes toward violence against women. The lack of a dedicated database means that these crimes are often buried within broader statistics, obscuring the scale and specificity of the issue.

That's why the work of feminist movements and grassroots organizations is so essential: they build counter-archives, preserve victims' stories, and embody the datatransforming numbers into acts of care and political engagement. Refusing to let them become cold tools of ideological polarization, they practice what is known as data feminism: using data as a means to challenge dominant narratives and demand real change.


Donata Columbro is a journalist and writer. She has been described as a "data humanizer" for her accessible and inclusive approach to spreading data culture. She writes for many outlets, including SkyTG24", "Lucy sulla cultura" and "Internazionale". She is an associate professor at the IULM University in Milan and the University of Lugano in Switzerland. She teaches data journalism in the LUISS Master's program in journalism and holds a course on Data Storytelling at the Scuola Holden. Every Wednesday, she publishes a newsletter on data, algorithms, and technology (tispiegoildato.it).
She is the author of the books Ti spiego il dato (Quinto Quarto 2021), Dentro l'algoritmo (effequ 2022), and Quando i dati discriminano (Il Margine 2024).