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.
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.
I think that penalty is a hate crime. But you’re correct.
Just let latin die already.
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 south america will still considered minorities, even though made up the mathematical majority of inhabitants
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.
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
Sometimes people run over others intentionally, so drag supports the recognition of vehicular murder, but yes, it’s usually manslaughter. A prior history between victim and accused or history of hateful conduct by the accused should be used as clues that a deeper investigation is required.
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.
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.
Calling it a logic trick is just a cheap way to devalue a valid argument
Does that make hate crime murder against men less worth prosecuting as such? Why shouldn’t the legal definition be symmetrical?
Because the legal system isn’t symmetrical, that’s not a thing, that’s not how anything outside of fucking physics work. The system responds to what people are doing in the material world. If bank robberies start going up, they are going to adjust the law to make it more efficient to process and punish bank robbers.
You’re avoiding the question. I haven’t seen you give a real reason why it shouldn’t be symmetrical yet. I know that the motivation is greater to prosecute more common crimes, but ideally why would it not be symmetrical?
How about you tell us why the legal system should be symmetrical if the situation isn’t? Why do the rich pay proportionally more tax than the poor? People are trying to make an unjust factual reality more just by acknowledging injustice is why.
Being rich is not an unchangeable identity nor a protected class; it is the result of one’s actions, and actions, unlike identity, must be treated differently by the law.
The legal situation should be symmetrical because for any individual victim, the frequency of crime done to various identity groups does not matter.
Related example: Rape is more commonly done to women. But male victims of rape should still be protected against it.
Unrelated hypothetical: Let’s say 80% of thievery was committed against women. Should men not also be protected against this crime just because it happens more often to another group of people?
I suppose you could make the argument that “the situation” is still not symmetrical, because women face more hate in their daily lives. But I fail to see how this should apply to the crime of murder or the punishment for its motivation.
It’s certainly true that femicide is a more important protection, as the majority of gender-motivated murder is committed against women (I have no proof for this, but it seems everyone here agrees on this). But that is not a good argument not to provide other genders with thr same protections from hate-motivated murder in the form of longer sentences as well.
I have provided several good arguments here. So again, I ask: Why in your opinion would it be worse to provide this protection to all genders?
What would give you that idea? What is it with folks who think equality is ignoring an actual problem?
If the hate crime part of the law were symmetrical, not only would that still handle the problem of femicide like the current law does, it would also handle hate crimes against other genders. Not making it symmetrical ignores more problems.
The currentl law doesn’t appropriately “handle” the problem of femicide…or else it wouldn’t be an outsized problem.
Symmetry is the problem. The justice system anywhere isn’t “one size fits all” for murder. There are already categories for infanticide, assisted suicide, accidental death, indirect murder, etc. It would be very very nice if there was an appropriate category for the infinite motivations for murder…but that’s not realistic.
Femicide is a problem in Italy so they passed a law. If males being targeted was a problem…they’d pass that law. Making an appropriate category for an existing phenomenon doesn’t mean it “ignores” anything else, as you’re claiming.
Yes, femicide is clearly a larger problem that has greater motivation to address it. But would it not be equally easy, and overall better, to address all categories of gender-motivated murder?
How many hate crime murders of men are there in Italy?
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?
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?
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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.
If someone murdered a male due to their sex, would you treat that any differently than someone murdering a female due to their sex?
And what if the moon was made of cottage cheese? When then??? 🤔🤔🤔
Downvote me if you’re a cry baby man :)
Womp womp bad faith argument
Lmao men mad keep crying bitch
You know we can see when you edit messages lmao?
It’s good to be wrong sometimes, if you always avoid the consequences by trying to head off disagreement (downvotes) you are doing yourself and anyone you talk to in the future a disservice. Saving face means losing the truth.
Good. I’m not wrong.
Give me one fuckin example let alone widespread anti men crimes you fuckin loser.
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.
Could you elaborate on why you believe this is not a valid line of questioning?
Check my profile. We’ve been discussing this for hours.
Sentenced to 4 hours of online gender discourse
I would assume the thinking is centered around wanting to draw specific attention to the issue. And to more clearly cite it as a unique thing for awareness purposes.
This. The goal is to send a message. Over half the women killed were murdered by intimate partners. Such a crime would already be punished by life imprisonment for Aggravated Homicide.
However femicide also includes refusal for emotional relationship, or resistance to limiting her freedom as motivators, as admissible motives for femicide.
https://eige.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/20211564_mh0421097enn_pdf_0.pdf
So, essentially its targeted towards violent incels among other specifics now.
Awesome.
So the data I linked alleges that ~43% of female homicides in Italy are committed by a current or former spouse. While a global estimate says that 29% of all female homicides are committed by current/former spouse or a family member.
So while I think this thread brings the incels out of the wood works… it’s not really targeting incels.
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.
So it’s only a hate crime if it happens to the gender that has a higher rate of being targeted?
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?
Yes
I bet you also think it’s impossible to be racist against white people.
If it happens for exact same reason I don’t see why one would be hate crime and the other not tbh
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’.
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.
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.
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
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.
Better to invent a new word where the word parts don’t explain it and so they have to explain it every fucking time like that girl whose name is only and forever “Megan with two Rs”.
Femicide isn’t a new word.
You, of course, realize that we’re using an existing word in the English language to describe a different existing word in the Italian language?
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.
Ah, but how often are they victims of murder because of their gender? Femicide isn’t just murdering a woman, the motivation counts.
Dedicating time and effort to focus on a special category of murder and implementing harsher punishments for perpetrators based on the demographic membership of the victim, feels counter to the equitable application of justice for a country at large.
Intentionally murdering a woman because she’s a woman, is in my view little different from murdering a person for any of the other reasons that get lumped together under things like ‘first degree’ and ‘second degree’ murders. This legislation change isn’t about making murder illegal – it’s always been illegal. It’s about making the punishment more significant if the victim is a woman and the prosecution can prove the murderer had any anti-woman comments/viewpoints.
There are examples of women killing men because they’re men – there are a few famous, and more less-famous, cases where escorts, for example, kill their johns because they’re easy targets. There are examples of minority groups killing majority groups because of clearly racist/hateful motives, that get excused because of the demographics of the perp and the victim. The legislation change noted, basically says killing people is bad, but killing women is somehow worse – ie. that the genders aren’t equally treated, and women are worth more / require more protection. To apply harsher punishments unevenly based on demographics is not what I’d consider a fair and impartial system – it’s one that’s been engineered to preference the protected group’s interests over the interests of the broader whole.
Besides, men get killed 2-5x more frequently than women in many western countries – why are we trying to protect the gender that has far better overall results? This is sorta a gender equivalent to giving tax breaks to the rich – they already have it better than others, why give them even more privilege? Add more supports to the demographic that has terrible stats in this area.
I agree with you, I just think that it’s valid to increase the penalty for hate crimes over regular crimes. Of course this would apply to murdering a man because of his gender too.
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.
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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