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.
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
I haven’t seen a valid argument in this entire post, just a lot of people who think that the law should apply evenly in all situations.
But nothing works that way. Everything we do in all facets of society are responsive and proportional.
I’m not seeing how anyone is being harmed by making it easier to prosecute men who commit violence against women when it’s a massively disproportionate problem. I’m not seeing a better alternative, I’m not seeing anything but a lot of guys in this post who are obviously hurt by this but can’t explain why. Maybe add value to the argument by making an argument and explaining why it bothers you.
Does that make hate crime murder against men less worth prosecuting as such? Why shouldn’t the legal definition be symmetrical?
Yes. Violence from the oppressed is not the same as violence from the opressor. In an unjust reality, law should strive for equity, not equality.
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?
Because the real world isn’t symmetrical, there are millions of factors that impact trends, attitudes, cultures and so on. If you don’t respond to issues appropriate to that scaling you will have spikes in problems. This is very basic, this isn’t even sociology, it’s just how everything works. If you don’t enforce building codes in an area where more buildings are being made cheap, that area will have too many buildings that fall over, whereas areas where the building codes are being adhered to don’t need the extra resources diverted to keeping a non-existent problem in check.
If you drink more milk than juice, you should buy more milk.
I am struggling to understand how this is a hard concept to grasp. Do you have an emotional or personal connection to this topic that is making it hard to see practicality in how our entire society is built?
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.
You have this backwards. The poor pay proportionally more than the rich.
On a different note, I’d argue that the situation in question (murder) IS symmetrical.
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 the same protections from hate-motivated murder in the form of longer sentences as well.
I have provided my argument, as asked. So again, I ask: Why in your opinion would it be worse to provide this protection to all genders?
If you look at the rates of social class transitions, you’ll find being rich or poor is not much less of an unchangeable identity than gender… But that’s not the point, you keep saying you don’t get the reasons why this law should be asymmetrical, so I’m trying to explain by analogy. The answer is equality is a bad foundation for lawmaking, equity is a better one.
Your hypotheticals and examples are very bad for someone who says elsewhere that
I’ll answer a better analogy : in a world where 80% of [insert any act of violence] is committed against women, should [insert any act of violence] against men still be prosecuted? Yes. Now, assuming a lawmaker believes that the harshness of punishments deters from crimes*, should that lawmaker make the punishment harsher for [insert any act of violence] committed against women? Also yes, that’s what’s happening here. That’s the definition of an aggravating circumstance such as a motive of hate: a reason for worsening the punishment. It’s still murder, only worse to account for the frequency asymmetry.
*If you don’t assume that, then the reasons for punishing anything more or less are mostly symbolic anyways, so by making an asymmetric law you’re only acknowledging symbolically that there’s an asymmetrical problem, but it’s mostly just posturing.
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?
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.
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?
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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.
It’s clear you don’t understand my point. I am always willing to argue in good faith if you are willing to understand what I am saying, but since you are not interested in doing that I will not be responding to bad faith arguments.
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?
You’re viewing law and order as symmetrical, it’s not like that. Nothing is like that, broadly as a global civilization we respond to imbalanced factors in order to preserve balance the best we can.
If an neighborhood is using more power than other neighborhoods, the power grid will be adjusted to compensate.
If you drink more juice than milk and you don’t want to run out of juice, you adjust your buying habits to buy more juice.
While some people probably have killed white people for their race, the problem here isn’t symmetrical, more white people have killed people of color for their race in most places than the reverse because of a complex historical context. The law, and all of society broadly, implements laws or other systems to balance imbalances. Hate crimes have been typically perpetuated by one group versus another. Gender-related crimes VASTLY dominate in one direction than the other, and I’m still not hearing a better solution for this fact from the standpoint of law and order.
Does this idea make you feel bad? Seriously, I’m wondering why this is being challenged without an offer of a better idea or solution.
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.
To take the example to its most extreme, you believe that a law that focuses on something that does happen regularly (in my country it’s the leading cause of murder in women) should be expanded to something that happens rarely. And the reason is optics? Am I misinterpreting your point?
Correct. Murdering a male should be just as illegal as murdering a female.
It’s like you can’t read past my first sentence. Nothing you’ve said has shown any light on how this is a sexist law. We’re both clear in the fact that you don’t like it, but that isn’t the barrier in front of you.
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?