*Not all men Yes all women
Ayse Asena Bacaksiz Emma Cocco Miriam Pardeller
The aim of this project is to represent invisible data on the topic of gender-based violence by displaying it in a poster and a data physicalisation.
Since July 2023, following the violence known as "Palermo rapes" (Sicily, Italy), the activist and writer Carolina Capria (@lhascrittounafemmina) started to use her Instagram stories to anonymusly share testimonies of women who were writing her about episodes of violence they were victims of. The latter were not reported, as it commonly happens, since our culture is based on a patriarchal system, which is not protecting victims neither socially nor institutionally.
This became our data: we analyzed each message from the first three highlights collections “YAW” on Capria’s account and built a dataset, to graphically translate written testimonies which, not being denounced, do not appear in the official statistics. The title of the project takes up the one used by Capria, “Yes all women”, as a denunciation of the fact that, even if, as often underlined, “Not all men” are violent, all women are or have been, at least once in their lives, consciously or unconsciously, victims of a more or less serious form of violence.
The poster represents the most relevant data resulted from our analysis through three graphs.
We used a heatmap to relate the type of violence acted with information about the abuser (who he is/was for the victim).
With a treemap we showed the connection between the type of violence and the place where it took place, and finally we compared the age groups of the victims with those of the abusers with an alluvial diagram.
Since our main aim was to work with missing data, we also decided to underline it in our graphs.The unreported information is indeed also shown in each graph as n.d., abbreviation of “non dato”, Italian for “not given”.
In the data Physicalisation we decided to make emotions tangible, as women who are writing to Capria are often expressing their feelings as victims in the messages. To do so, we created a digital network with the software Gephi.
Then we created a physical version of the network, where black pins represent women, while white pins, forming different groups, represent the emotions, each marked with a flag.
The more women felt a given emotion, the larger the group of white pins becomes. Each black pin is then connected by a thread to the white pin(s), corresponding to the emotion(s) that woman felt.
In the context of an exhibition, our network is made to be participatory, so we designed instructions to allow victims of gender-based violence, that feel to participate, to add their own pins, contributing to the collective expansion of the network.
Information Design & Visual Storytelling
