There are images that never arrive, that remain on the margins of the public gaze, confined to the parallel circuits of social media, scattered among context-free footage and testimonies that are difficult to verify, and yet repeated, insistent, from different sources. They are images of public corporal punishment, of floggings, of stonings, of bodies exposed to violence as a collective warning, of dissidents beaten and humiliated.

Scenes which, in certain areas of the world, have been documented for years by organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and which concern very specific legal or political contexts, fromIran toAfghanistan under the Taliban, to territories controlled by armed groups such as Hamas.

Yet these images, although they exist, rarely enter the Western, and in particular the Italian, television narrative. They do not appear in the news, they are not shown, they do not become the subject of an ongoing narrative.

Visible violence and invisible violence

On the contrary, other scenarios of violence – such as those related to contemporary conflicts, first and foremost that between Israel and Hamas – permanently occupy the centre of media attention, with a daily presence and a strong emotional charge.

The result is an asymmetrical perception of violence: what is visible becomes shared reality, what is not shown tends to disappear, or be perceived as marginal.

But the difference between the different forms of violence – in their modalities, in their possible legal codification or in their public dimension – is far from secondary. Not all violence is the same, not all have the same social and political significance, not all are inscribed in the same relationship between individual, law and community.

A distinction should be made between the violence of war, which has always been inevitable, and the more deaf, continuous, creeping and cowardly violence that poisons even times of peace, often with the explicit consent of the community of reference in many countries of the world.

Documented facts: an ignored reality

If one moves down from the plane of perceptions to that of documented facts, the picture becomes more precise.

In Iran, caning is provided for in the penal code and concrete cases have been documented in recent years. In Saudi Arabia, until recently, it was applied as a judicial punishment. In Afghanistan, after the return of the Taliban, the United Nations and several NGOs have documented floggings and public executions.

In some areas of northern Nigeria, where Sharia law is in force, there are similar cases.

In the Gaza Strip under Hamas, Human Rights Watch reports document arbitrary arrests, torture and ill-treatment of political opponents. Similar situations also emerge in contexts such as Somalia, where violence is a systematic instrument of social control.

These are real, documented and often structural phenomena, which affect women to a greater extent, victims of continuous and often public violence.

And yet, these cases rarely enter the Western television narrative. They do not build collective visual memory: they remain in the dimension of the written report, rather than that of the shared image.

How media selection works

To understand this gap, one has to get into the workings of the media machine.

Images do not reach the public simply because they exist: they arrive because they are selected, verified, edited and contextualised. The most extreme content often comes from sources that are difficult to certify and circulate on platforms such as X, lacking independent confirmation.

For a television newsroom, especially a public one like RAI, this represents a real limitation. Even when information is verified, there is a hierarchy of news that privileges what can be read as a global event: wars, international crises, conflicts with a direct impact on the West.

In this sense, the conflict between Israel and Gaza becomes a permanent centre of gravity of information.

The disproportion of images

The images from Gaza, broadcast daily, construct a continuous sequence of destruction and civil suffering. The point is not to deny the reality of these images, but to highlight the disproportion between what is shown and what is left out.

One could argue that the difference depends on the nature of the events: a war produces a continuous flow of new facts, whereas corporal punishment is perceived as repetitive.

But precisely this repetitiveness signals a structural dimension. Violence that lasts over time, whether planned or tolerated, represents a stable mode, an active cultural element and an obstacle to integration in democratic societies.

Television vs. social: two opposing distortions

In the transition from written report to visual representation, this dimension tends to dissolve. Images of war build immediate empathy; systemic violence requires context and analysis.

This creates an implicit distinction between tellable and untellable violence.

There is a further element to this: while television filters, social media amplifies. On platforms like X, extreme content is shared without guarantees of authenticity or context.

The result is a double distortion:

• on the one hand, television that tends to exclude
• on the other hand, societies that multiply without verifying

Effects on public opinion

This selection inevitably reflects onpublic opinion. What is shown every day becomes the yardstick by which the world is judged.

Repetition builds familiarity, and familiarity builds evidence. Conversely, what remains outside the dominant visual circuit struggles to enter the collective consciousness.

The result is an implicit moral geography, in which some violence appears central and others peripheral.

The silence of the moral authorities

Alongside this media asymmetry is another form of silence: that of the language of the great moral authorities.

In recent years, the pontiffs have condemned violence in general terms, but have rarely gone into the details of practices such as flogging or stoning. Their discourse remains universal, more related to principles than to concrete forms of violence.

A cultural and moral issue

To say that violence is always wrong is an indisputable statement, but it risks being insufficient without the ability to distinguish, describe and name.

Not all violence has the same relationship with the law, society and public consensus. Just as all those who fight a war are not equal.

When there are contexts in which corporal punishment is expected or tolerated, to limit oneself to a generic condemnation is to give up understanding the specificity of those phenomena.

The risk of selective silence

The risk is that this selective silence – media on the one hand, linguistic on the other – will produce a paradoxical effect: making one part of the violence perfectly visible and leaving another, no less real and documented, in the shadows.

Because what is not named, in the long run, risks not existing. And what does not exist in the public space ends up, sooner or later, not even existing in the collective consciousness.