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)
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.
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.
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!
(That’s the reason the lawmakers gave too.)
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)
This is probably more for the victims than the killers.
And what does this do for them? They’re still murdered, just like a woman murdered by another woman.
Maybe I should have specified that it’s for the survivors of the victims. I personally can’t relate, but I suspect some people would feel a lot better if the crime is specified as a distinct type of murder.
Beccaria is spinning in his grave.
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