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.
People here seem weirdly confused about the term “feminicide”: it means homicide motivated by misogyny. It’s a subset of hate crimes.
They exist in all western societies I’m aware of, if you’re confused it’s probably only because you’re unused to thinking of women as a protected class and hate for women as aggravating circumstances, the way hate for any race of religion is in most legal systems.
Yes they’re 50% of the population, but also yes they’re disproportionately the targets of violence because misogyny exists. Yet they are rarely treated as such in many legal systems.
Women may not not be a mathematical minority, but they absolutely are a cultural/societal minoritiy.
Cultural minorities have nothing to do with the absolute number of members the group has, but how much political and social power and influence the group holds.
That’s why black africans during apartheid Africa would still be considered minorities, even though they made up the mathematical majority of inhabitants.
Shouldn’t it be gynocide? Since it’s clearly pulling from Latin. Activists should be forced to work with linguists for their words, or face the penalty of be hit with a 2x4.
Goddamn I wish the biggest contention about this story was the etymology.
gyne is Greek, femina is Latin.
I think that penalty is a hate crime. But you’re correct.
Just let latin die already.
I see no reason to make a special specific word as every category needs this…
They should just add modifiers to the category: Assault for instance can get aggravated and hate crime as adjuvants. Murder has manslaughter and degrees and could have hate crime modifiers.
This is a more fair and clear generalized solution of core concepts than entirely new specific categories.
The word just existed since 1652
So not very long at all /s, not that it shouldn’t be a word, but rather, why complicate the legal system needlessly when such systems rely on relativity, clarity, and consistency. Outside of that context we can have 10000 words for it.
The “confusion” seems intentional…or rather a symptom of the very problem the new class is attempting to address.
Many people seem to believe that a femicide charge is automatically a more serious charge than murder. It isn’t.
Many people believe that the law explicitly targets men. It doesn’t (No more than a “standard murder charge or an assault charge “target” men, they just commit murder and assault more often).
Many people believe that the very existence of a femicide charge diminishes the importance of a murder charge. It doesn’t, they carry the same sentence.
If homicide and femicide carry the same sentence, what is the point of all this?
The point is culpability. It’s the same reason there’s separate charges for infanticide, assistance a suicide, manslaughter, etc. It a class of charges so culpability, and therefore justice, can be more accurately meted.
Your note about disproportionate targets is misleading and inaccurate. Femicide is specifically about murders as far as I know. In the vast majority of countries, men are victims of murder more often than women (in Italy, men are victims about twice as often). They have higher rates of being assaulted/maimed at pretty much every age category in most western countries.
What you’re likely trying to gloss, is the oft repeated “victim of domestic violence” stats, which is a niche area of violence that gets used by feminist movements to ignore the arguably greater violence that men face on the regular. This sub-division is even more biased, given that men generally don’t report spousal abuse / are less likely to get injured to the point that they get hospitalized by it. Even after the victims of ‘violence’ includes pretty well all categories, in many western countries the ‘results’ are roughly even between genders – Canada for example is at about 48% of all violent offences being committed against men, and 52% against women. But again, not all those crimes are really equal – men are over represented in fatal / serious violent assaults causing injury far more often than women. They both experience violence at the same ‘general’ frequency, but men are more likely to be left maimed/dead.
Murder’s murder, in the eyes of many. It’s strange to provide additional protections for just one demographic, especially when that demographic is far less frequently the victim of murder.
Ah, but how often are they victims of murder because of their gender? Femicide isn’t just murdering a woman, the motivation counts.
Dedicating time and effort to focus on a special category of murder and implementing harsher punishments for perpetrators based on the demographic membership of the victim, feels counter to the equitable application of justice for a country at large.
Intentionally murdering a woman because she’s a woman, is in my view little different from murdering a person for any of the other reasons that get lumped together under things like ‘first degree’ and ‘second degree’ murders. This legislation change isn’t about making murder illegal – it’s always been illegal. It’s about making the punishment more significant if the victim is a woman and the prosecution can prove the murderer had any anti-woman comments/viewpoints.
There are examples of women killing men because they’re men – there are a few famous, and more less-famous, cases where escorts, for example, kill their johns because they’re easy targets. There are examples of minority groups killing majority groups because of clearly racist/hateful motives, that get excused because of the demographics of the perp and the victim. The legislation change noted, basically says killing people is bad, but killing women is somehow worse – ie. that the genders aren’t equally treated, and women are worth more / require more protection. To apply harsher punishments unevenly based on demographics is not what I’d consider a fair and impartial system – it’s one that’s been engineered to preference the protected group’s interests over the interests of the broader whole.
Besides, men get killed 2-5x more frequently than women in many western countries – why are we trying to protect the gender that has far better overall results? This is sorta a gender equivalent to giving tax breaks to the rich – they already have it better than others, why give them even more privilege? Add more supports to the demographic that has terrible stats in this area.
I agree with you, I just think that it’s valid to increase the penalty for hate crimes over regular crimes. Of course this would apply to murdering a man because of his gender too.
The vast majority of the time Men are killed by other men. If there was an epidemic of women calling for violence, hatred and subjugation of men supported by podcasts and propaganda and it was resulting in a large increase in murder then we’d need to address that problem too.
Casually throwing feminism under the bus – a movement that focuses on women’s issues (to the overall societal benefit of everyone) – for focusing on women’s issues?
Huh. Is this socially acceptable now? I thought we were better than this.
Feminism has a place, but it is explicitly about promoting women’s interests – something which if allowed to continue unchecked, leads to significant disadvantages for men. It leads to the sorts of toxic masculinity backlashes that you see in the states, especially because moderates who question women’s privilege in advanced western economies start to support more extreme anti-woman positions, because there’s a perception that left wing feminist leaning ideologies work against their interests. And they’re right.
An egalitarian approach is better, once you’ve gotten to near parity. Most western countries have been at near parity for generations at this point.
I think that’s a dangerous belief. I don’t see the difference between saying that and saying “Equality for black people has a place, but it is explicitly about promoting black interests – something which if left allowed to continue unchecked, leads to significant disadvantages to whites.”
Those two statements aren’t equivalent. Feminism is not just about equality (though that’s a huge part of it). If your second statement were something like “elevating black people has a place…”, they’d be equivalent. In that case, yeah, it could hypothetically go beyond equality into something unjust.
I don’t see anything wrong with that second note, translating the position into one about race instead of gender.
Equity-type programs often get started based off of aggregate differences in statistical data based on demographic slices, with good intentions. But I’ve yet to see any cases where they build in a process for removing equity support programs once a ‘goal’ is reached / more parity is visible in the data.
So as an example from Canada, equity employment programs were introduced in the mid/late 1980s to address the imbalance between men and women in the workforce. You can see how this played out in the public workforce data. In 1990, shortly after the leg came in, it was at about 54% men, 46% women. By 2000, it had flipped in favour of women, at 48% men, 52% women. By 2010, 45% men, 55% women – a greater imbalance than in the 1990s, the imbalance which had triggered supports to get put in place for women. That roughly 10% gap persisted through to 2020 at least. No legislation has been introduced to remove preferential hiring for women in the public sector, no legislation has come in to promote hiring men due to the shift in the gender imbalance.
On a racial basis, the same pattern can be seen in our post secondary education grants, bursaries and scholarships. Funding for these sorts of initiatives in Canada allows for them to screen for specific equity groups – what some term visible minorities. The roots of that being based on reasonable equity goals – ie. there’s a statistical gap in education levels for a minority group, so they allow people to target funding to minority groups. However, while these policies have been enforced, white men have become one of the least educated groups in Canada, with about 24% of white men attaining a degree, compared to 40% of asian guys (with the highest rate of attainment amongst chinese/korean guys, at ~60%). White men are still not considered an equity group, and so cannot have funding specifically targeted to them to try and address this equity issue. And we haven’t ‘removed’ the ‘disadvantaged’ minority groups from receiving systemic advantage, even though they are out performing the supposedly privileged majority group. The system quite literally has race-based controls working against white men, with a justification of correcting an imbalance that not only doesn’t exist in the data, but where the data shows white men as significantly worse off. The system is basically designed to kick them when they’re down.
I can highlight that education item a bit more using a personal example. A coworker of mine has a kid going to BCIT, one of our western province’s “leading” tech-type schools. They’re Canadian citizens, recent immigrants from eastern Europe, not wealthy by any stretch. They tried to get financial assistance for the kid through the school, but the advisor bluntly told him there were no grants/bursaries etc that he could apply for, since the kid was a white guy – all the available funding was targeted to different racial sub groups. He would have more charitable funding options available from the system we’ve setup here, had he been a third generation millionaire visible minority.
You’re right! That’s why we should prosecute all traffic deaths as first degree murder. Someone drunkenly stumbles into the road, into your path, causing you to run them over and kill them? Mandatory minimum life sentence for you. After all, death is death, killing is killing. We don’t give a shit about people’s motives.
I doubt they are saying to discard all motives; specifically they said “murder is murder” so using cases that aren’t intentional (ie manslaughter, not murder) undermines your point. It’s more that there’s an upper limit or certain criteria where we stop caring what the person’s motives are, so where do we draw that line? I don’t pretend to know the answer, but it’s a question worth exploring even if you think you know the answer already.
There’s never been an upper limit on criteria in the eyes of the law, what an odd thing to say.
All adding a charge for femicide does is refine their legal system to they have another charging mechanism that might more appropriate assess culpability. They don’t actually have to use the charge, and the addition of the charge doesn’t diminish charges for other types of murder in any way.
ie there’s no outcry when somebody is charged with infanticide or assisting in a suicide, etc…because motivation matters when you’re charging a crime so the system can appropriate mete justice…femicide is no different. The fact that there’s an “outcry” is a symptom of the problem it’s trying to address.
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