When asked about the causes of violent behaviour against women, 83% of young Italian women believe that the main reason is the cultural environment in which they live every day.

Webboh Lab put forward an instant survey for the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, to which 8,000 girls and women between the ages of 12 and 20 responded. 71% of today’s teenage girls, who will be tomorrow’s adults, blame the culture of male dominance and sexist mentality for violence against women.

According to the young girls and women questioned, the cause due to “behaviour” is entirely marginal: violence, for them, does not stem from stressful states or psychological problems, but from a society that has normalised the position and social power of men, role expectations, and attitudes exalting strength for too long, without any self-criticism, looking for the cause in the ‘monster’, in order to take away responsibility.

The research shows that, in the perception of girls, there are at least five profiles of violent men: the self-absolvers (43%), i.e. those who continually justify their violent behaviour, reflecting a culture that perpetuates it; the medievalists (19%), who are linked to entrenched gender roles and family dynamics; the amplifiers of violence (17%), who experience aggression as an echo of bad media reports about the violence in the world around them and the impact on society; the underpressured (12%), represented by those who struggle with personal stress and family pressure; the de-empowered (9%), who blame power and gender role imbalances for their violence.

The identification of complex and different profiles of violent men makes it clear that multiple measures acting on different levels are needed. Solutions proposed by different experts that emerged from the interviews – from affective education to psychological counselling, from awareness-raising activities to the adoption of more restrictive measures when the first signs of aggression appear – must be applied in a targeted manner for each behavioural profile and for the individual subject.

Webboh Lab, created from the meeting between Webboh (3 million followers on social media) with the research institute Sylla, with Chief Science Officer, Professor Furio Camillo, is the first Permanent Observatory on Gen Z. Webboh Lab’s commitment is to gather the voice of the younger generation, to investigate and explore the issues in order to bring them to the table of those who make decisions for them, the adults of tomorrow.