Italy’s parliament on Tuesday approved a law that introduces femicide into the country’s criminal law and punishes it with life in prison.
The vote coincided with the international day for the elimination of violence against women, a day designated by the U.N. General Assembly.
The law won bipartisan support from the center-right majority and the center-left opposition in the final vote in the Lower Chamber, passing with 237 votes in favor.
The law, backed by the conservative government of Premier Giorgia Meloni, comes in response to a series of killings and other violence targeting women in Italy. It includes stronger measures against gender-based crimes including stalking and revenge porn.
It means the murder of a woman motivated by misogyny. It is a subset of homicide and also a subset of hate crimes. It can be thought of as recognizing misogyny as a motive of hate and thus an aggravating circumstance to a homicide, and women as a protected class. Killing a trans woman or a trans man could very well get a “transphobia” label for a double hate crime, depending on the motives that get established. This is not as complicated as you seem to believe.
It’s not complicated, it’s just sexist and not explained in the linked article.
If a man kills a woman out of hatred for women that’s a terrible crime and should be severely punished. But if a woman kills a man out of hatred for men, that is exactly as horrific a crime and should be punished no less severely.
Sexism in law benefits nobody.
It isn’t sexism in law. Laws are written in blood. If women are frequently being killed because they refused sex or a relationship, then a law should exist as a deterrent. It isn’t just “killing a woman because they hate women,” it’s specifically in cases where women are stalked, harassed, or pursued non-consensually for sex or a relationship. If women were targeting men in the same way, a law should exist in that case as well. That isn’t the case, though. Women are VASTLY disproportionately killed by men for reasons pertaining to sex and relationships compared to the other way around.
Italy sees a problem: women are being frequently killed by intimate partners, stalkers, and harassers specifically because of their gender. They made a law to deter that. If the opposite problem presents itself they should do the same.
Assuming murdering women was already considered murder, this law will make absolutely nothing to deter that, and might in fact increase violence against women due to the press about it causing an increase in misogyny.
It’s just politicians scoring brownie points by doing absolutely nothing significant.
The way to deter that is education, not adding some symbolic years to a sentence that should already have been deterrent enough.
If the possibility of being sentenced for murder didn’t deter someone, neither will the possibility of being sentenced by femicide, or any other form of aggravated murder.
What will deter them is understanding that murdering someone who isn’t an immediate terminal danger to society as a whole (billionaires and the like) is monstrous and inhumane and shouldn’t ever be done unless it’s the last option in self defence, and that “because they refused to have sex with me” is among the stupidest and most embarrassing justifications for murder they could come up with, but, again, that could only be achieved through education, something Italy doesn’t seem to be doing because, unlike inventing new names for already existing crimes, it actually costs money.
It’s not a redundant law any more than hate crime laws are redundant. You aren’t understanding the premise. It’s not a new crime entirely, it’s like hate crime charges. They can make sentences more severe or reduce the possibility of early release, among other reasons. By the same argument you’re making, hate crime enhancements for violent crime are unnecessary and performative, because those crimes were already illegal.
Hate crime enhancements do work. Why wouldn’t this? In any case, it’s a clear statement being made by society at large that that behavior is unacceptable.
Citation needed.
And just plain old murder isn’t?
You want misogynists (or rather their children; most of the grown ones won’t learn, no matter how many of them you throw in jail) to understand that it’s unacceptable, fucking spend the time and money teaching them it’s unacceptable, and why.
This doesn’t teach anyone anything. It’s just empty political posturing. If it has any perceptible effect on the number of crimes against women (and that’s a very big if) it’ll be to increase them.
I am not suggesting that education shouldn’t happen. It’s the far more effective long term solution, part of addressing the underlying causes of hate-motivated crimes. Hate crime laws do not do nearly enough. However, in the short term, getting those that commit hate (or gender) related crimes off the street for longer is going to save lives, and maybe convince some offenders to change their mind. I think you misunderstood my meaning. Hate crime laws of any kind do not prevent hate crimes.
They do absolutely reduce hate crimes, as those that commit hate crimes are likely to reoffend. The benefits in proactive reduction are hard to prove and collect data on, as are all crime statistics, where there are simply too many variables to account for. However, reoffender rates are easily documented, and a law that takes those likely to reoffend off the street for longer than linked non-hate crimes would is absolutely reducing those types of crimes.
The whole point is centered around how sexism runs deep in society. Specifically men dominating the world and placing women below them.
the way you object to this sounds like someone on Reddit talking about men’s rights. To me.
Then invest in education. That’s the only effective way to handle these kinds of societal problems. Attack the root cause: ignorance and lack of critical thinking skills.
Adding some years to a sentence that should already have been deterrent enough won’t make it any more of a deterrent.
This does absolutely nothing to solve the problem and might actually increase it, all so some politicians can score some brownie points.
(Of course, though, increasing education and critical thinking and reducing ignorance A), costs money, and B) is anathema to populist politicians who need an ignorant unthinking population to have any voters, so they’ll just change the name of an already existing crime, further increase division, give themselves a medal for a job well done, and call it a day.)
Every time we draw a line and say “women need special protection”, we are implicitly saying “men don’t matter.”
The very simple fix for this is to keep laws gender-neutral, and let the disparity between prosecutions for hateful murders of women vs hateful murders of men be reflective of the actual disparities in the two sexist hatreds.
Unfortunately, we live in a world where a fact like “41% of American women report experiencing domestic partner violence” will be read as an excuse to ignore that 21% of men report the same thing.
https://www.cdc.gov/intimate-partner-violence/about/index.html
I’ve encountered women arguing that all domestic violence and rape is from men, which would require one-in-five men to have had a homosexual relationship and all such to have been violent.
Yes, men tend to be physically stronger than women and thus male-on-female IPV is often more harmful, but we already have laws that distinguish based on level of harm. And, yes, too many counties are sexist hell-holes that make American red-states look like feminist utopias.
But I don’t think we as a species can sexism our way out of sexism.
I just don’t see this as sexism. But I’m not against you sharing your opinion. I’m not trying to argue.
These laws already are gender neutral, just like all anti discrimination laws.
If they were gender neutral, it wouldn’t be accurate to describe them as “banning femicide.”
Maybe you’re right, and the reporting is the sexist part and not the law. I can’t read Italian and am unfamiliar with the intricacies of their legal system, so I’d be delighted to be proven wrong.
But saying “oh no, it cant be that bad” is exactly how we got woman-killing abortion bans in parts of my country.