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.
Does this imply that previously killing women wasn’t criminal in Italy?
I presume that femicide is a subset of “homicide”, but I can’t tell if it means “any killing of a woman”, “any killing of a woman by a man”, “any killing of a woman because she’s a woman”, or “any killing of a woman by a man because she’s a woman”.
And I shudder to imagine how trans-women and trans-men fit into this weirdly sexist label.
(In America we have nice gender-neutral crimes, with enhancers if it was done out of prejudicial hate.)
It sounds like it’s killing someone specifically because they are a woman and not for another reason. So, intent is what they’re trying to target here.
Yet we don’t find the same applies to men
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It does. Laws like this are always written gender neutral. Same thing with laws banning discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. It’s just as illegal to fire someone for being straight as it is to fire them for being gay.
These laws are always written to protect everyone. But conservatives such as yourself will read a headline and then whine about minority groups receiving “special treatment.”
Got a source that’s the case here? This is special laws for “antisemitism” all over again
This is false as far as I can tell; the change is to the Italian Penal Code, specifically Article 577. I can’t find a primary source for the text of the change, but all secondary sources (example) I’ve read say that the life sentence applies “when the act is committed as an act of hatred or discrimination or prevarication or as an act of control or possession or domination as a woman, or in relation to the woman’s refusal to establish or maintain an emotional relationship or as an act of limitation of her individual freedom” (translated to English). It appears like this could be a (near-?)direct quote of the legal language used in the change to the penal code. Do you have a source that contradicts this?
I’ll come burn a cross on your lawn and then insist I can’t be charged with anything other than violating local fire ordinances…
If you come and burn a cross on my white church-going family’s lawn you should be charged with same list of assault, trespass, and arson charges as if you did so on my jewish, black, or pagan friends’ lawns.
A group of black men who banded together and murdered a white boy for dating one of their daughters should be charged with the same anti-lynching statutes enacted to stop the KKK.
The white christian guy who bombs a federal building because the government doesn’t do what he wants should be charged under the same terrorism statute as a brown muslim guy who bombs a federal building because the government doesn’t do what he wants.
Are you being dense on purpose or what?
Wow, so progressive
No, it does not imply that other murder is less serious. The notion that you seem to believe it does is evidence of the problem that it’s trying to address. It take a certain type of flaw in logic to assume that because a group is “getting” something, it means another group is losing something. The legal system isn’t zero sum.
There’s no outcry when somebody is charged with infanticide, and there should (logically) be no outcry here.
Yo would be able to tell what the charge means if you read the law, instead of trying to guess. Nowhere in the law does it say “by a man”,for example. You’re projecting injustice where there is none.
Oh, you’ve read the law in question. Great! I can’t read Italian, and the linked article didnt have a statement of what the law actually said.
Does the law specify “woman” as a protected class or “gender”?
With the enactment of this law, is a man who murders a woman for the covered motivation treated differently than a woman who murders a man with the equivalent malice? What’s the actual difference?
You could also read the law if you used the internet, instead of writing a half-cocked message to me. I know you have it.
The difference is culpability. We don’t treat the murder of an infant, assisting a suicide, or indirect killing the same way as a “standard” murder charge…and femicide is no different. It’s just another tool in the toolbox so justice can be more accurately delivered.
So, what’s the link to this english-language translation of the law in question?
Here’s an unattributed quote presumably from such from a BBC article:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1dzp050yn2o
As described in the above quote, it seems exactly as sexist as I presumed – special protection in the law for cis women, which categorically excludes cis men, trans men, and trans women from its protection.
Do you have a contradictory summary or, ideally, a link to the actual text and a professional translation?
You didn’t understand the link you posted to me correctly and I’d expect you’d misunderstand anything I pasted to you as well.
Nowhere in that quote does it mention the gender or orientation of the perpetrator. You seem to fundamentally project your own biases.
We don’t define in law the assisted suicide of a white cis man as categorically less severe than the assisted suicide of a black genderqueer female.
Are you familiar with the US Supreme Court case Moritz v. Commissioner (which my wife brought to my attention after she saw the movie.)?
An important advance in feminist law was literally about a man who wanted a tax deduction but was denied because the deduction was meant for women.
At no point does this law say femicide is more or less important than other murder.