It’s rare for Italian lawmakers from across the political spectrum to agree on anything. But on Tuesday, the lower house of Parliament unanimously ratified a law introducing the crime of femicide into Italy’s criminal code, punishable by life in prison.

(title from entry in NYT’s The Morning newsletter)

    • cabbage@piefed.social
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      17 days ago

      It’s threatening our god-given right to murder our women, after all. The woke agenda has gone too far.

      I been sitting over here on Parchment Farm Ain’t ever done nobody no wrong

      Oh Lord, I believe I’ll be here for the rest of my life All I did was shoot my wife

    • Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe
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      17 days ago

      Because it doesn’t make a difference.

      So a woman murdered by a man is somehow more murdered than one murdered by another woman, a sister, a lover?

      This is an arbitrary distinction. Someone was murdered, why they were murdered doesn’t change the fact they were murdered, and frankly if you’re going to say it will change sentencing, it shouldn’t.

      Murder is murder, the end.

      • Formfiller@lemmy.world
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        17 days ago

        It’s a huge problem in Italy and a lot of women are being killed. The maximum sentence is 25 years so what this does is tack on another charge. Motive always is examined in murder trials. If there was a billion dollar propaganda industry telling women to abuse and subjugate men and that was resulting in an epidemic of murder then that would have to be addressed by the law.

      • cabbage@piefed.social
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        17 days ago

        When a cop murders a black man it’s self defence, when a man murders a woman it’s a brief display of bad judgment in a moment of passion. Society has never seen murder as murder “the end”.

      • Devial@discuss.online
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        17 days ago

        Yes it should change sentencing, because the primary goal of the justice system should be rehabilitation, not punishment, and there are absolutely people who have commited murder and are capable of being fully rehabilitated, and those that can’t, and they should not be sentenced the same.

        Or do you seriously think, for example, people who end up murdering their abusers out of revenge or desperation should actually receive the same punishment as someone who murders a random person purely because they hate something about their identity, or an abuser who murder their victim ?

  • cabbage@piefed.social
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    17 days ago

    Meanwhile in France they’ll label it a crime of passion and let you go scot-free.

    Anyone questioning why this is necessary should probably take a minute or two to read up about femicide and how we tend to treat it as a society.

    • BastingChemina@slrpnk.net
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      16 days ago

      Do you have sources for that ?

      Because in not a lawyer or have any expertise in law but your comment got me curious and what I’m reading seems to contradict your statement.

      Like here :https://www.savoir-juridique.com/crime-passionnel-mythe-realite-juridique-droit-penal/

      It seems that there is very rare cases when passion was used to lower the sentencing but it’s very anectoctical and the “crime passionel” is not recognized by French law

      • cabbage@piefed.social
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        16 days ago

        I had Bertrand Cantat in mind when I wrote the comment. The fucker got away (except a very minor prison sentence once) with murdering two of his partners, all in full view of a public spectacle. There’s a Netflix series about him from this year that’s well worth a watch. It’s not that the crime of passion is explicitly used as a legal argument, but there is a romanticized idea that men will sometimes kill their partners out of “loving them too much” and that this is only tragic and not something that we should blame them too harshly for. So it’s not recognized in the law, but French judges have more or less routinely shown themselves to be sympathetic to the argument.

        The European Court of Human Rights has recently had a series of rulings in which it calls out France for being particularly shit with regards to women’s rights.

        • BastingChemina@slrpnk.net
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          16 days ago

          Thanks, I’ll have a look at these.

          Edit: so, in the case of Marie Trintignant’s murder by Bertrand Cantat, the whole trial happened in Lithuania under Lithuanian laws. The crime of passion is a legitimate defense in Lithuania but this has nothing to do with French laws.

          For the fact that sexual attacks against women are often downplayed by justice in France, this is a real fact. The recent Pelicot trial really brought this to public light.

          • cabbage@piefed.social
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            16 days ago

            Yes, this is true - I forgot that the trial happened in Lithuania where crime of passion actually has a formalized role. But the french media nevertheless accepted the narrative and the French public largely followed suit.

            As for the second murder/death which happened in France, there has been what is hard to describe as anything else than at best an active neglectance on the side of both the French police and justice system, both leading up to and following the death. I guess this is more symptomatic of the French tendency to simply not take women or their deaths seriously—ascribing the crime of passion to France was probably unfair of me.

  • blackroses97@lemmy.zip
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    16 days ago

    As domestic violence survivors this is a great start and more countries should follow however i do believe their should be harsher laws regarding domestic assault. Often times they let go , scott free of any charges because of he said /she said even with evidence . Since they do not face any real consequences it can eventually escalate to femicide . They need to be stopped before it gets to that point .

    • skarn@discuss.tchncs.de
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      16 days ago

      Penalties for homicide in Italy, are generally still harsh enough that increasing them won’t realistically make a difference.

      But this kind of murder is most often an escalation, and so the chance for prevention exists. But that sounds hard, increasing the penalty for the murder to life +5 yeas is easy.

  • Sal@lemmy.world
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    17 days ago

    As much as I don’t mind this, part of me thinks this won’t do anything… Men who kill their female partners don’t care about any possible consequences. If they thought about those they wouldn’t abuse their partner in the first place. There’s a reason the TF2 Sniper in his Meet the Team video says blokes who bludgeon their wife to death with a golf trophy have too many feelings. They literally cannot fathom consequences, considering that if their abuse manages to get to that point, it’s because NO ONE cared to fucking intervene.

      • Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe
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        17 days ago

        And what does this do for them? They’re still murdered, just like a woman murdered by another woman.

    • cabbage@piefed.social
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      17 days ago

      I’d say it’s about recognizing a fact of life that we have traditionally brushed under the carpet. By introducing femicide as a specific category it’ll be easier to talk about (or rather, harder not to talk about) just how fucking common it is for men to murder women.

      It’s a huge problem in most if not all countries, and it doesn’t receive nearly as much attention as it deserves. The attention it does get is primarily through folk songs or true crime podcasts, not actual attention as a systematic issue that needs to be addressed as a societal problem.

      So it won’t deter anyone from murdering women, but when it does happen it might make it easier for us to start actually doing something about it as a society.

      • Sal@lemmy.world
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        17 days ago

        Ah, I see it now. As someone who lives in Brazil with one of the highest rates of women being killed by their partners (or, usually, former partners), we had this classification for a long while, but I never understood as to why. Now I do!

    • Devial@discuss.online
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      17 days ago

      It’s a way to take the severity of the motivation into account when sentencing.

      Someone who committed murder could have done so under all sorts of mitigating circumstances, classifying the crime as a hate crime speaks to the horrificly unjustifiable motivation, and is indicative of someone who should be less likely, or ineligible for parole.

      Sure, we could just keep calling it murder, and take those things into account anyway, but I think it’s ultimately good to have these distinctions, and there’s plenty of other similar cases where we do distinguish between crimes based on intent, rather than outcome, particularly for crimes against people (you may, for example, apply your exact logic to the distinction between 1st and 2nd degree murder, or even murder and manslaughter. It’s not like a murder 1 victim is any better off for their killers crime being called murder instead of manslaughter)

          • quick_snail@feddit.nl
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            15 days ago

            The solution is for the mods to ban links to shitty sites like this that can’t load in hardened browsers

            • Aatube@kbin.melroy.orgOPM
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              15 days ago

              i am a mod and i can load this in floorp, waterfox, microsoft edge, safari, mercury, pale moon, and librewolf, in private browsing, with and without uBo disabling JS for floorp and chr*mium. what are you seeing? if you’re seeing a paywall, try disabling ClearURLs or whitelisting ?unlocked_article_code. the only browser i tested where this crashed or froze or didn’t even display content is servo which is alpha and quite incomplete

              • quick_snail@feddit.nl
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                15 days ago

                Try Tor Browser on strict mode.

                Use what refugees, domestic abuse survivors, whistleblowers, human rights workers, and journalists operating in oppressive countries are using.