On 23 July 2025 The Senate unanimously approved a bill regarding the crime of “femicide”, the text is not yet law will be only after it is approved in identical text also in the Chamber.
Many titles have synthesized: “Femininenicide becomes a crime punished with life imprisonment”, it is a simplification that makes the idea only partially, because it is not that until now it was not a crime to kill a woman, and to do so as a woman, as part of a discriminatory context and/or within a relationship: The crime was already there and the life sentence was also but it was one of the many ways of performing a murder perhaps aggravated by the relational context and Parantela. The fact the law that was there was working and sorted the same life sentences that the new rule is proposed is also proven by the news: the murderers of Giulia Cecchettin, Giulia Tramontano, Francesca Deidda, all recently reached the first instance judgment, led to three sentences to life imprisonment.
The sense of a law, between symbolic value and effectiveness
Also for this reason around this law that unanimous politics greets as a success with a symbolic value, there has been actually an intense debatewho involved jurists, anti -violence centers, adopts to the works, and not because the problem of women’s safety in relational contexts, indeed, is not perceived. The disvalue of “femicide” is not under discussion in any context. What he has done and will do long to discuss is whether it was necessary to establish an ad hoc law and crime for facts that already found with the laws that were already the maximum penalty provided for the system.
In the absence of a regulatory vacuum there was really a need for a specific law? Many jurists ask if. And above all, Beyond the symbolic fact of giving a name to things to become aware of their gravity – so far the notion of femicide in most countries, including Italy, was a non -legal sociological – the new law will help to protect women at risk more and better to contrast a phenomenon that in Italy concerns about 30% of voluntary murders in a year that have one of the lowest rate in the world.
The answer is not univocal, on the symbolic value the jurists are divided and there are doubts that concern different aspects, starting with the writing of the law. The first criticism– who had seen take sides in writing in the past few months 90 university teachers and criminal lawyers all women – concerned the poor determination of the crime for as it was designed: A rule too vague, difficult to interpret, could have made the new rule less effective than what was already there. A unanimous criticism of the experts who brought the justice commission led by Giulia Bongiorno to amend the text to define the new “femicide” a little more precisely.
The text initially spoke of “act of discrimination or hatred towards the offended person as a woman, to repress the exercise of his rights or freedoms or, in any case, the expression of his personality”. A defineration deemed vague. The relational aspect and above all the element of the “refusal of the woman to establish and to maintain an emotional relationship” was missing. Or even to want to “suffer a condition of awe or in any case a limitation of his individual freedoms”.
Same gravity different penis?
The concept has also been extended to those who perceive themselves as a woman, but it is not registry, because otherwise it could have been possible to have some constitutionality problems, in terms of equal citizens before the law. Although There are jurists who still ask themselves, for example Gian Luigi Gatta, professor of criminal law at the Milan state road, on the fact that it is constitutional to provide, for example, a different gravity, for similar situationsif the victim is a woman instead of, for example, a homosexual killed by his partner.
It is a problem that could ask itself, in the event that a similar event occurs, because – since criminal law is unable to act by analogy – there would be an equal conduct punished in a different way: it is a bit what happened with the road murder. When a manslaughter similar to that accomplished with a machine was accomplished on a lake with a boat, to avoid inconsistencies to the system, and the substantial injustice of punishing the same fault with penalties of different gravity, there was a need to urgently introduce a “nautical” murder. But so you risk having to continually write new laws to pursue reality, increasingly imaginative than the most imaginative of legislators.
Similar speech is valid for the bis of the new law on the feminicide to derogate from the limit of 45 days to the interceptions, introduced recently (in force from April 24). A system that continues to do and undo, to put rules and to introduce derogations you risk constantly forfeiting factors of inconsistency and confusion, ultimately to promise a lot to work little.
Pros and cons
If the increase in protection to the children of the women who remained compromised by attempts of femicide is unanimously considered, instead the criticism of the law of being “in financial invariance” is widespread, that is, at zero cost without a euro more of financial coverage for the prevention of a crime that everyone recognizes to a socio-cultural matrix And therefore hardly contrasted by relying only on the hope that the threat of a dry life imprisonment, without the modulation of the sentence in the maximum and in the minimum, can lead to desisting from the purpose of killing the woman with whom you are or has been related.
The experience of Latin America
The ad hoc crime of femicide or femicide has existed for years in some Latin America countries, where the phenomenon is widespread, but its preventive efficacy according to scholars to be demonstrated: «In a cultural and social context like that of many countries of the Central and South America, which have statistics not far from those of Mexico, the presence of a strong discriminatory, sexist, violent component against women justifies or in any case explains a legislative construction operation (in past years, indeed) of an autonomous crime of femicide, writes Massimo Donini of criminal law to wisdom. “Of course, it is a question of seeing what a frequent appeal to the legal definition of the crime as the killing of a woman” because of her woman’s condition “by her husband, ex -husband, companion or former partner, or in certain contexts of relationships, or for misogyny, or with contempt for the body of the victim etc. There are numerous definitions that present problematic aspects ».
But according to the professor, a halving of the phenomenon not comparable to that of Italy, where the voluntary murders of Men and Women in one year are about 300, one of the lowest rate of the EU average, against the approximately 30 thousand annuals of Mexico, is comparable.
The request for prevention
“I’m afraid,” he wrote on 3 June regarding the effectiveness of the new law in the online magazine of the University of Trento, Elena Mattevi, researcher, among the proponents of the document signed by the 90 jurists, “that the proposal to introduce an autonomous case is rather inserted in a trend that arouses a certain concern: the one for which there is a media campaigns with high emotional rate that ingest concern in the citizens, responding to the citizens, responding to the citizens, responding to the citizens, responding to the citizens, responding to the citizens. Criminal law is used as a sort of “social anxiolytic”, to use an effective expression of a colleague, without any concern about the impact of regulatory intervention in terms of effectiveness and effectiveness. We can really think, for example, that a man left by his partner, unable to accept or manage the refusal and abandonment and that he has not yet managed to internalize the values of the freedom of the woman or more generally of the person other than herself, has to dissuade from committing a crime of murder – or feminicide, in the event of acceptance of the reform proposal – given that the expected penalty can always be that of the ergastol and Of minimum twenty -one, however aggravable up to life imprisonment in the presence of the circumstances mentioned above? ”
To conclude: “I fear that by marrying a merely punitive logic, with the illusion of having finally found a good solution, we end up forgetting the main objective: that of working on prevention policies, really trying to intercept in time and avoid these tragedies that represent one of the most serious expressions of the different forms of discrimination and violence that characterize our society in increasingly worrying. The investments to be made are conspicuous, in economic, relational, emotional and, of course, cultural terms ». These are the same topics that resort in the reflections of the associations that deal with women at risk and anti -violence centers that do not stop remembering that reassuring does not always be enough to introduce actual security.
