This study aims to elucidate the potential of social advertisements that address violence against women in raising awareness among spectators about its causes. Based on Luc Boltanski´s theories on the politics of pity, the study compares two campaigns: one from the Brazilian government entitled “Violence against women: its evolution leads to feminicide. Watch the signs. Denounce it.” (2022) and another from the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S & D) of the European Union, entitled “Violence against women: time to act” (2019). Both campaigns are similar in depicting women subjected to physical and verbal violence in the context of domestic environment, but their objectives are different: the Brazilian campaign seeks to encourage denunciation, while the European one aims to engage the European parliament to criminalize this form of violence. The analysis undertaken in this study is structured, according to Jacques Aumont and Michel Marie, into three aspects: contextual, descriptive and citational. In the citational aspect, strategies from the Peircean semiotics are applied to inventory possible interpretants or effects of the films, considering its qualitative, referential and conventional aspects. Thus, the reflections presented aim to contribute to the construction of a specialized knowledge about how media can address realities, as well as to provide insights to the producers and creators regarding the effectiveness in promoting social changes related to violence against women.