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.
Genuinely thought it just meant killing a woman and was confused
It does get misused in that exact way sometimes. I’m from Mexico, these cases have been making big headlines here for a while now, some prosecutors are misclassifying cases as femicide to grab attention to their political careers.
Local one a couple of years ago where a dude ran over a woman. Local prosecutor was pushing for femicide, fortunately it was moved to manslaughter as it should have been from the start. Not everything constitutes a hate crime and cases like that (in my opinion at least) would make the distinction meaningless
It seems weird to consider half the people as “protected class”. But only one gender. Dunno why they didn’t just make hate crime the charge and make misogyny fall under that
They’re a protected class because they’re singled out for violence because of their class. And it’s a real world problem not a logic quiz. Misogyny and misandry are not equivalent in reality the way they are in the dictionary.
If someone murdered a male due to their sex, would you treat that any differently than someone murdering a female due to their sex?
Nothing more than sex based whataboutism.
It’s not whataboutism, it’s the very obvious logical followup question. The mistake you’re making is assuming by default that the question means they hate women or some such nonsense.
Reading other comments they’ve made, that person is definitely not a feminist. But alright I’ll give the painful answer to the whataboutism: yes.
Yes, in a society where misogyny is rampant one should consider misogyny differently than misandry. Same for racism. If you take a less extreme case than murder, a white person using a derogatory term for a black people will get canceled and labeled racist, at worse a black person using a derogatory term for white people will get laughed at, and people will assume any actual racial hate is a response to the systemic racism they’ve experienced. And most likely they’ll be right. Even if logically those are two sides of the same coin, if your coin is unbalanced applying every correction to both sides will never work.
The asymmeyrical social reality informs what people feel about hate, and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t inform lawmakers decision in trying to correct this asymmetry.
And what if the moon was made of cottage cheese? When then??? 🤔🤔🤔
Downvote me if you’re a cry baby man :)
Seriously.
I am massively disappointed with the number of dumb chuds on this site who are looking at this like a goddamn fucking logic trick and feeling some kind of personal offense to the fact that some men, somewhere, are committing a disproportional level of a specific kind of crime.
Exactly. This should have been something that applies to all: ‘murdering someone due to their sex is now a hate crime’.
Having the law give more consideration to one sex over another, particularly with something like murder, is quite sexist.
This would be true if there were commensurate rates of murder where the motivation is misandry. Otherwise you just like the veneer of equality to cover up the rot underneath.
If perpetrators happen to be of one sex more often, then it means the rates of being charged with the relevant crime will be higher for that sex.
A crime must be treated equally, regardless of sex. The law treating one differently based on their sex is itself sexist. As I stated before, this should have been something that applies to all: ‘murdering someone due to their sex is now a hate crime’.
How is it sexist? Both men and women are equally culpable for their actions under this law. It just takes into account intent which is difficult to prove in most cases. Nothing about the law takes the sex of the perpetrator into account.
Murdering someone due to their sex is not illegal under this law, if the victim is a male. Murdering a male due to their sex should be no less illegal.
It’s always illegal to murder someone it just sets the circumstance when a crime can also be considered a hate crime.
Then we wrap back around to the start. That would only be true if there were a commensurate killings based on misandry. You keep jumping back and forth between perpetrators and victims. The lawmakers saw an issue and created a law to target that issue. If you have evidence that they’re ignoring them feel free to show it, but nothing about this law is sexist on the face of it.
I would have to disagree. The quantity is irrelevant, the existence of the hate crime is all that really matters.
I can understand what they are doing here (bringing attention to the rampant mysogony), but I do think that could have been done better by having it be a hate crime law with a definition on sex/gender as the motivation, but call it out or name it to address the rampant mysogony.
But a hate crime is a hate crime, and should be treated as a hate crime regardless.
Edit: Just to say, I don’t get the impression that what I suggested is the case here, but maybe I’m misinterpreting things. Feel free to point out if it addresses hate crimes based on identity more generally, I’d be happy to hear it. Doesnt seem to be the case from the article though.
Correct. Murdering a male should be just as illegal as murdering a female.
Of course murdering someone due to their sex is illegal if the victim is male, it’s murder
Some people argue that intent shouldn’t be considered when sentencing people for their crimes.
I believe intent impacts a perpetrator’s potential rehabilitation (something a lot of countries put very little effort into when keeping people incarcerated) and should therefore affect sentencing.
If that’s how the other commenter feels I’d be happy to have a different conversation, but judging by his replies I don’t know if he’s arguing from there or not
You’re assuming that the perpetrators will be male, the law doesn’t say that. Your argument is that if males are the perpetrators more often…then the law is sexist? By that logic most laws are “biased” against men.
You’re incorrect that the intent or text of the law is to add extra punishment. It’s just it’s a charging mechanism that carries the same sentence. It’s a law dealing with a real world problem and it makes it less likely for perpetrators to escape culpability. Folks act as if the crime of homicide has been somehow diminished, when it hasn’t.
That I don’t understand. How does this help to stop a murderer from escaping culpability? Maybe you mean it’s a question of intent and the recognition of femicide avoids someone pleading a lesser charge due to heightened emotional state, but still I don’t see how that isn’t covered by just recognizing gender based violence/killing as a hate crime.
To me this looks like a pointless law which doesn’t change anything much in a practical sense, to create the appearance of doing something about a problem which really requires a serious social and educational approach. I recognize that femicide is a real and gender specific problem, but the law shouldn’t be, because justice should always be even handed. I believe the reason this law is gender specific is because they are pretending it’s a solution to the problem, which it isn’t.
It’s as impractical as an infanticide law.
Yes, the system also should and is focusing on education.
Infanticide law is generally used to reduce what might otherwise be a murder charge, to make allowance for the mental stress of recent childbirth. It typically carries a lesser sentence. So it has a purpose and an effect.
But that’s not the case with femicide. I’m not convinced that this law has any purpose other than making an empty gesture. Do you think anyone contemplating the killing of a woman is going to think twice because they might be tried for femicide instead of plain old murder? If not, it won’t prevent a single killing.
So it’s only a hate crime if it happens to the gender that has a higher rate of being targeted?
Yes
If it happens for exact same reason I don’t see why one would be hate crime and the other not tbh
I bet you also think it’s impossible to be racist against white people.
This is typically how the legal system responds to increases in specific kinds of crimes, they adjust the system to more efficiently prosecute that crime.
If you have a better idea for how to combat disproportionate crime statistics without targeting that specific kind of crime, from a legal standpoint, I’m sure the world would love to hear it.
How does making it a hate crime to kill men because of their gender take away from it being a hate crime to kill women because of their gender?
Do you think killing a white person because of their race shouldn’t be a hate crime?
You’re viewing law and order as symmetrical, it’s not like that. Nothing is like that, broadly as a global civilization we respond to imbalanced factors in order to preserve balance the best we can.
If an neighborhood is using more power than other neighborhoods, the power grid will be adjusted to compensate.
If you drink more juice than milk and you don’t want to run out of juice, you adjust your buying habits to buy more juice.
While some people probably have killed white people for their race, the problem here isn’t symmetrical, more white people have killed people of color for their race in most places than the reverse because of a complex historical context. The law, and all of society broadly, implements laws or other systems to balance imbalances. Hate crimes have been typically perpetuated by one group versus another. Gender-related crimes VASTLY dominate in one direction than the other, and I’m still not hearing a better solution for this fact from the standpoint of law and order.
Does this idea make you feel bad? Seriously, I’m wondering why this is being challenged without an offer of a better idea or solution.
Your offer of a better solution is to charge the act of killing someone because of who they are or what they believe should be a hate crime.
If more men commit hate crimes against women than women committing hate crimes against men, then there will be more men charged with hate crimes than women.
Are you purposefully taking the exact same stance that maga is taking on DEI?
It would seem weirder to me to have 100% of people be a protected class
I just assumed it was some smaller more specific groups. But I think it covers most people
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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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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.
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.
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.