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.
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.
To take the example to its most extreme, you believe that a law that focuses on something that does happen regularly (in my country it’s the leading cause of murder in women) should be expanded to something that happens rarely. And the reason is optics? Am I misinterpreting your point?
Correct. Murdering a male should be just as illegal as murdering a female.
It’s like you can’t read past my first sentence. Nothing you’ve said has shown any light on how this is a sexist law. We’re both clear in the fact that you don’t like it, but that isn’t the barrier in front of you.
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.
Femicide also has a “purpose and effect”, because you’re proving a different crime.
I think you have a limited understanding of the law and the world.
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.
I am not offering anything, I am explaining the reasoning for this law and laws like it, which a lot of people in this post seem to be having a hard time with.
I read this like, five times and and I don’t know what you’re saying.
And? This is indeed how cause and effect work. Unfortunately temporal anomalies haven’t been discovered that can change how things lead to other things.
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