Italian men commit far more rapes in Italy than foreigners do, the director of the national statistics institute, Istat, said on Monday.
Addressing a United Nations-backed conference on gender statistics, Linda Laura Sabbadini said foreign men were responsible for just 10% of rapes committed Italy.
She also noted that in the vast majority of cases, 69%, the rapist is the victim's partner.
''Yet the image we have is of women being attacked on the street by immigrants,'' she said.
Istat's director said there were similar misconceptions about general physical violence on women, pointing out that most serious attacks take place in the home.
''However, this is not the situation portrayed in the media,'' she said.
According to Sabbadini, statistics have a crucial role to play in undermining such media stereotypes and helping address the real issue.
''Failing to take into consideration the available statistics can result in mistakes in terms of policy direction and priorities,'' she explained.
The issue of immigrant crime has been in Italian headlines for weeks, with reports of a crime wave involving foreigners.
The most notorious case saw a Romanian charged with the murder and attempted rape of a 47-year-old Italian woman, resulting in an emergency decree for the expulsion of potentially dangerous foreigners.
Monday's conference, the Global Forum on Gender Statistics, also spotlighted the importance of fighting inbuilt discrimination in collecting and collating statistics.
While ethnicity, age, sexual orientation and disability are categories often discriminated against in data collection, said Sabbadini, gender remains the most serious factor.
''Studies have shown that whenever there is ethnic or age discrimination, for example, this is usually also accompanied by gender bias - a kind of double discrimination,'' she explained.
As part of a general policy to improve women's lot in Italy, the government is working closely with Istat to eliminate gender bias in statistics gathering.
Equal Opportunities Undersecretary Donatella Linguiti explained: ''We need statistics that take into account sexual difference, allowing us to publicize the specific problems facing women. This is the only way we can design effective gender policies and monitor the actual results''.
