Abstract:

Gender violence is still a worldwide problem. For instance, in Spain, in 2008, seventy-five women were killed by their couples (INM, 2009), and in the time passed of the present year, the figure reaches 49. Advertising campaigns focus on the necessity of reporting this kind of events by asking for the collaboration of the citizens or encouraging women to report them. However, their effectiveness is in doubt since one of the reasons why women do not report is the afraid of suffering from a second victimization by the society. In order to understand the social influence that women victims of gender violence bore, we have to identify the prejudices that society has against them. Some of theories that have explained discrimination are the theory of Social Identity (Tajfel and Turner, 1979), the Self-Categorization theory (Turner, et al., 1987) and Social Dominance Orientation (Sidanius and Pratto, 1999). The current society demands some solutions that eradicate the gender violence. To do so, this problem must be faced from the prevention standpoint and from early age. In this contribution, we propose an alternative way to fight against gender violence, from the education, by using the new technologies and focused on the identification of the prejudices that society has against women victims of gender violence. A website was designed in order to, first of all, identify the stereotypes associated with women victims of gender violence, and secondly, infer results and pieces of advices that could help the teaching staff to design strategies to remove these prejudices. Based on the theories previously mentioned, an instrument was developed to measure the perception of women victims of gender violence. The above-mentioned scale consists of two parts, the first one, with forty-one items, assesses the perceptions of women victims of gender violence, and the second one, with twenty-eight items, assesses the perception of this type of violence. Then, this scale was adapted to be filled up in Internet. Finally, a web solution software was programmed to show the questionnaires in a suitable way on the web, let students provide with their answers, identify the stereotypes that students have about women victims of gender violence, and last but not least, infer recommendations about how the teaching staff should cope with the situation.

Keywords:

Gender violence, stereotypes, education, new technologies.