Violence Against Women in Politics within the European Parliament: Mechanisms, Experiences and Institutional Responses.

Violence Against Women in Politics (VAWIP) is not a new phenomenon. VAWIP is a form of gender-based violence that takes place within the political sphere, a particular dynamic that reflects a structural barrier to women’s full participation and engagement in political life. Despite scholarship has documented for long time sexual harassment, online abuses and gendered hostility targeting female politicians, often, was not enough. Yet, the main scholars’ mistake has been to examine the phenomenon in isolation, rather than studying it within specific institutional environments. The focus of this thesis is the European Parliament (EP), a paradoxical institution. Formally, the EP is one of the most gender equal legislative bodies existing, an actor devoted to democracy that promotes equality driven mechanisms, with an historical commitment toward gender equality. Despite this, evidence shows that sexism and gendered hostility are still perpetrated within its walls. Attention is required also in analysing how different forms of violence, occurring both online and offline, affect politicians across the European legislative institution, trying to understand how these are able to shape lived experiences and the political use of agency. It is precisely this gap that the present research tries to address: the divide between what the institution formally promotes and what female members (MEPs) experience. The central question driving this thesis is: how does Violence Against Women in Politics operate within the European Parliament, and through which mechanisms does it shape the political agency and political participation of female Members of the European Parliament? Drawing on a qualitative case study methodology, this thesis combines the document analysis of seven key institutional texts produced between 2018 and 2026, along with semi-structured in-depth interviews with seven Italian female MEPs, conducted between April and May 2026. These two methods are applied through five thematic categories: Offline forms of VAWIP, Online dimension of VAWIP, Behavioural responses and silencing effect, Institutional responses and formal mechanisms and Implementation gap. In that way, this method will allow for a systematic comparison between the institutional narrative and the lived experiences of female MEPs. Findings will reveal that VAWIP operated within the EP on two distinct registers: inside the Institution across subtler and normalised dynamics, and outside the Institution, where the online violence emerges as the most impactful and least institutionally addressed dimension of VAWIP. Every participant reported having experienced gendered cyberviolence, from citizens or political opponents, rendering the institutional internal governance as structurally irrelevant to address this form of violence. This research identifies a central paradox. The European Parliament has produced many ambitious legislative instruments addressing gender-based cyberviolence across the world. Despite this, it has not extended the same logic to the protection of its own Members. The implementation gap documented in the corpus is then confirmed from the inside by the MEPs. All respondents across the full range of the political spectrum described pretty much the same dynamics, used the same language and reached the same conclusions: formal rules are necessary but insufficient. Meaningful change requires addressing informal norms and to the institutional culture, which the current instruments cannot reach.