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.
The whole point is centered around how sexism runs deep in society. Specifically men dominating the world and placing women below them.
the way you object to this sounds like someone on Reddit talking about men’s rights. To me.
Then invest in education. That’s the only effective way to handle these kinds of societal problems. Attack the root cause: ignorance and lack of critical thinking skills.
Adding some years to a sentence that should already have been deterrent enough won’t make it any more of a deterrent.
This does absolutely nothing to solve the problem and might actually increase it, all so some politicians can score some brownie points.
(Of course, though, increasing education and critical thinking and reducing ignorance A), costs money, and B) is anathema to populist politicians who need an ignorant unthinking population to have any voters, so they’ll just change the name of an already existing crime, further increase division, give themselves a medal for a job well done, and call it a day.)
Every time we draw a line and say “women need special protection”, we are implicitly saying “men don’t matter.”
The very simple fix for this is to keep laws gender-neutral, and let the disparity between prosecutions for hateful murders of women vs hateful murders of men be reflective of the actual disparities in the two sexist hatreds.
Unfortunately, we live in a world where a fact like “41% of American women report experiencing domestic partner violence” will be read as an excuse to ignore that 21% of men report the same thing.
https://www.cdc.gov/intimate-partner-violence/about/index.html
I’ve encountered women arguing that all domestic violence and rape is from men, which would require one-in-five men to have had a homosexual relationship and all such to have been violent.
Yes, men tend to be physically stronger than women and thus male-on-female IPV is often more harmful, but we already have laws that distinguish based on level of harm. And, yes, too many counties are sexist hell-holes that make American red-states look like feminist utopias.
But I don’t think we as a species can sexism our way out of sexism.
I just don’t see this as sexism. But I’m not against you sharing your opinion. I’m not trying to argue.
I’m really curious how you don’t see “we make crimes against one sex worse than crimes against the other” as sexism.
Do you mean it in a “racism is discrimination + oppression” kind of way, where no discrimination against men can be “sexism” due to the patriarchy? Or maybe you think this is more like “free tampon dispenses in the women’s restroom” and the disparity is simply right and proper due to differences between the sexes?
I personally react to this the same way I react to definitions of rape that go something like “the insertion of a penis into another human without their consent”, which excludes cis women rapists from even being charged as such. Or rules allowing “maternity leave” for new mothers (beyond mere recuperation from childbirth) but denying “paternity leave” for new fathers (who may be doing all of the parenting depending on the state of their [possibly deceased] partner.)
These laws already are gender neutral, just like all anti discrimination laws.
If they were gender neutral, it wouldn’t be accurate to describe them as “banning femicide.”
Maybe you’re right, and the reporting is the sexist part and not the law. I can’t read Italian and am unfamiliar with the intricacies of their legal system, so I’d be delighted to be proven wrong.
But saying “oh no, it cant be that bad” is exactly how we got woman-killing abortion bans in parts of my country.