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.
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.
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.
gyne is Greek, femina is Latin.
Goddamn I wish the biggest contention about this story was the etymology.
Just let latin die already.
I think that penalty is a hate crime. But you’re correct.
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.
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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