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.
Idk probably less and so the law against hate crimes for men would be used less than the one against them for women. Again, why would you not treat them the same in each individual case? If 80% of thievery was committed against women, would you not also prosecute the 20% committed against men just the same?
At no point did anyone suggest that they weren’t prosecuting murder against men, nor did they suggest they would do so with less effort. All this law does is allow the courts to take misogyny into account so that motive isn’t ignored or downplayed during the charging proces.
Yes, they prosecute murder for both genders. I’m asking why the hate crime aspect that increases the sentence is not the same.
To be clear, I think the femicide change is a good thing, just unnecessarily restrictive.
It doesn’t necessarily increase or decrease the sentence.
Are you asking why genders are different, and why violence isn’t equal? That’s a very deep topic the law is attempting to partially address.
You are incorrect. The relevant laws can be found in the Italian penal code. Article 575 sets the minimum punishment for homicide at 21 years. Article 577 lists circumstances that would upgrade this sentence to a life sentence, and the suggested change is to add femicide to this list. So yes, it necessarily increases the sentence.
I am not asking why genders are different and violence is not equal (this should be obvious to anyone listening to the women’s rights movement in the last 30 years). My argument has nothing to do with the relative frequency of crimes against different genders. I’m asking why a murder motivated by hate for someone’s gender would not be treated the same in any case, as it is with most identity-based hate crime laws. Do you think that because one identity group has more crime of a certain type done against them, they should be treated differently in each individual case about that crime?
Yes, and when somebody murders a woman because they’re a woman, now there’s a charge where the relevant jurors can take into account state of mind etc.
That’s why I used the wording I did. They both potentially carry life sentences. It should go without saying that femicide is a type of murder with a portion of the culpability “baked into it”.
The reason is because the genders aren’t the same. If there was (functionally) anyone being murdered because they were a man, then the law would also cover men. It’s curious you mention “other identity-based hate crime laws”, because Italy happens to not have categories for homosexual people like other jurisdictions might - for example.
Yes, I believe that gender-based crime is a different crime and it should be treated as such. Ideally there would be a category for the infinite potential culpabilities for murder, but that’s not realistic. I think femicide is realistic because the crime is relatively common.
Interesting
I guess I just don’t get the reasoning for not making the law cover all genders. It’s good that we covered one, but why not the rest? Yes, there are infinite motivations for murder, and we can’t cover them all; but that doesn’t mean we should exclude certain motivations when it would make sense to cover them. The impossibility of making a perfect law should not prevent us from makingg obvious improvements.
Because the situation is not symmetrical. Acknowledging that there is an oppressed side is not the same thing as denying the privileged one. Pretending murder will not be prosecuted in Italy if the victim is male is just you larping and not at all what enshrining feminicide in law means. It’s just aggravating circumstances. Murderers of males will be prosecuted for murder without the aggravating circumstances of misogyny as a motive because it wouldn’t make any sense. And misandry is not the societal problem that misogyny is, so it would be kind of insulting to make them a protected class.
You’re acting like a four year old whose disabled brother got a wheelchair and who wants one of his own, saying “it’s not fair”. It is.
Perhaps I was not clear. I am referring to the prosecution being “the same” in the sense that a gender-based motivation in the murder of a man would qualify it as a hate crime. Of course men can still be prosecuted for murder either way; surely you didn’t think that’s what I was saying?
Not nearly on the same scale, no. But should it not be protected against at all? Femicide is certainly a more pressing matter to enshrine into law, but we might as well make it as comprehensive of a protection as we can/should while we’re doing this. As far as I know, most hate crime laws (at least in the US) actually are symmetrical in this way. If one of the identities being protected is more vulnerable to crime, the hate crime protection will be used to protect them more often. Seems logical to me.
Is there a need for insults here?
It’s not an insult, it’s an apt analogy. This argument is childish. In an unjust reality, law should strive for equity, not equality. The US is not a model for how hate should be treated.
Ok so you responded to none of my actual points, cool.
Your wheelchair analogy doesn’t even make sense in the context of this discussion. It would be more like if my brother was more prone to being injured, so in the event that one of us does get injured, only he gets the wheelchair. That’s the argument you’re making-- basing the appropriate solution to an individual’s situation on the frequency of how likely that situation is to occur. Which makes no sense.
A law which helps all genders fight hate crime here DOES provide equity because it will help the genders more affected by hate crimes proportionally more than the ones that are less affected!
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