The Italian government approved a draft law that for the first time introduces the legal definition of femicide in the country’s criminal law and punishes it with life imprisonment.
The move, announced on the eve of International Women’s Day on Saturday, aims at tackling a shocking string of killings and violence targeting women in Italy through strengthening measures against gender-based crimes like stalking and revenge porn.
The proposal, agreed on late Friday, still needs to go through parliament and must be approved by both chambers to become law.
“This is an extremely significant bill, which introduces the crime of femicide in our legal system as an autonomous crime, punishing it with life imprisonment,” said conservative Premier Giorgia Meloni, who strongly backed the initiative.
“It introduces aggravating circumstances and increases sentences for crimes including personal mistreatment, stalking, sexual violence and revenge porn,” she said in a statement.
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As we all know increasing the severity of punishments does wonders against crime.
It’s why the United States has some of the lowest crime rates in the wor-… oh…
But seriously, this is performative regulation that does hardly anything to reduce femicide. Significantly increasing education budgets and youth services just doesn’t get the same positive reaction from the general public.
See the women’s rights organization’s statement at the bottom of the article:
“It’s a propaganda move,” said activist Serena Fredda, while marching with thousands of people in the center of Rome. “This is a government that tends to multiply crimes and forgets that, despite the increase in penalties, there is no real deterrence.”
While domestic violence needs to be curbed, this somehow feels like a step back for feminism. Just the word itself.
The bill could emphasize domestic violence and the rape/murders. Mostly women are the victims, so they could have kept this ungendered. The only reason I see to specify femicide is because women are generally weaker and cannot defend themselves as well (please correct me if I’m wrong, as this seems to be the problematic part).
If it works, sure, let’s do it. I want people to be able to walk on the street confidently. It just feels like a red flag.
Femicide is a specific type of homicide, under which women are killed because they are women i.e. the “fem” part relates to the motive, and only indirectly the victim’s characteristics. Honour killings are a good example of this.
So this is good for feminism because it explicitly recognises and protects against crime that is driven by misogyny.
I guess if we can establish a protected class, it could deter violence. While I am the furthest thing from an Italian lawyer as possible, I highly doubt that there aren’t a handful of laws already in place that couldn’t be enforced to combat violence against women.
This could be a solid step in the right direction and enough to hand out harsher sentences where the motives are clearly misogynistic in nature.
Maybe I’m a bit in over my head, as I do have to think about the terminology, and many things come through fuzzy, to say it best. I just can’t shake the notion that at best this is only a loaded signaling, at worst another loophole to somehow horrificly abuse.
I’d rather imperfect steps be taken towards something better than wait until something perfect comes along.
We have yet to see how this makes things better. If I were having an especially sceptic day, I’d just say this is a propaganda play (y’know, with women’s day around the corner). ‘Meloni is standing up for the weak’ - is the message I am getting.
If we can take it at face value, we can pocket the win. But having a gender-related rule created by a right-wing politician that hints at pushing conservative points makes me wary.
Luckily it doesn’t really matter what I believe, because there will be metrics on the matter. I do hope this new law helps curb violence. If nothing else, it’s a PSA that revenge porn is bad, which is way better than not talking about it.
So while I’ll start by noting I seem to remember hearing something about a serious misogyny problem in Italy, mostly relating to revenge porn iirc. This also tells as racism to me tbh. “Muslim immigrants are honor-killing all the women!” Type of scare which I DO know is common anti-muslim rhetoric.
And that with a right-wing government. I respect that. The right-wing parties in Germany, including the CDU/CSU, would never think of doing that.
Two reasons: the murder of Giulia Cecchettin sparked public concern about feminicide, and secondly, the Prime Minister is a woman.
Yeah, that’s really interesting to me as well. Does anyone have an explanation for this? (You can somehow dress this in tradwife, cishet-only vibes and it’s cool or something?)
I don’t know how accurate it is, but I’ve been on a years long bender of true crime and it seems like men kill a lot of women.
