by Stefania Bartoccettifounder of Telephone Donna Italia*
A general premise: the murder crime provides for penalties proportionate to the methods found in the criminal action. This explains the reason for the different judgments relating to the same crime, the murder. With the introduction of the crime of femicide, the attention has shifted to the gender theme: the victim is a woman. And then it is necessary to reconstruct the circumstances of such a crime: the woman killed by her partner was or is linked to it; Indeed, they lived under the same roof and often raised children together. We underline it: victim and executioner have lived together. This aspect, combined with the gender theme, makes a question arise, always the same in truth: what is the murder from femicide different?
For example, that man is not the woman (omicidio e femaleCidio), who, in the case of crimes against the person, translates into this: for a man, Killing a woman is also acting with cowardice, because the woman has less physical defenses compared to man; In addition, femicide always has an emotional prerequisite. Then yes: killing love makes the crime more hateful. Then yes: in the crime of femicide we recognize the action accomplished in a family context, a place of meeting and love rather than clash.
But that’s not all: killing a woman is, in many circumstances, also kill another life, that of the daughter or son. It is a metaphorical death, but always of mourning we are talking. Therefore, the crime of femicide is, in the vast majority of cases, always a double death. Why is femicide different from murder? Because the man who kills a woman, hers, knows she performs a double death, she knows she also rages on the life of her daughter or son. So yes: the crime of feminicide, which is always preceded by contexts and circumstances known to the executioner, must provide for a pain other than that of the murder.
But it also needs to be released from the jurisprudential theme and enter this other: where the vulnus Between those who kill their partner and all the social and institutional messages that, at least for twenty years, have invaded the means of communication? What does not work in those messages if the victims of femicide increase rather than decrease? Because the feminicide also seems moved by the contempt and the calculation of death, given that it plans the death of its partner. The feminicide is building death; He is an architect of pain. Is this not enough to make his crime more serious?
Yet the communication campaigns say everything on the theme of femicide: who performs it is not twice responsible? He would have the tools to understand and stop, but proceeds towards his goal without feeling reasons. Then yes: Towards men who do not feel reasons but only follow their murderous instinct, perhaps the time has come to be without reasons in granting mitigating. Because it is time to look at the feminicide in the eyes and tell us: he did not stop his hand in time that took away two lives. What other crime is more blind than that? Blind twice: because he had seen, as well as lived, with both. And he didn’t help him.
