Once again, femicides and gender-based violence are being declared an emergency. This time, it's the highest office of the state, the President of the Republic himself, who is doing so. --- On September 17, Mattarella paid an official visit to the "pink room" of the Grosseto hospital, where the Pink Code was launched as a pilot project in 2010, which became institutionalized and then applied throughout Italy in 2016. On that occasion, the president declared that " The phenomenon of violence against women, which previously was not even given adequate attention, is an emergency of primary importance in the life of our country, as everywhere ."
He also called for the need to eliminate " this sort of delay, deficit, cultural deficiency and absence of humanity, which is at the root of the phenomenon of violence ".
Terms like patriarchy and sexism, the true culprits of gender-based violence, are once again taboo in official communications.
A few days ago, ISTAT data confirmed the widespread and pervasive nature of gender-based violence in Italy: 15.3% of Italian women between the ages of 16 and 75, or approximately 3 million, and 11.4% of foreign women of the same age, or over 244,000 people, have experienced at least one form of physical or sexual violence before the age of 16.
The last two decades have seen a resurgence of security and repressive policies that have fueled and exploited feelings of fear and insecurity, implementing a punitive response that has seen the introduction of increasingly harsh penalties. In this context, violence against women has often been invoked as a moral justification for this "punitive populism."
Thus, starting in December 2025, the crime of femicide (Article 577 bis of the Criminal Code) was introduced: since then, official data have only counted as femicides those cases for which criminal proceedings have been initiated to date under this specific crime.
According to the latest ministerial data, in the first half of 2026, only 8 cases were classified as femicides, while 28 were defined as voluntary homicides (art. 575 of the Criminal Code).
However, the situation recorded by the Observatory against Feminicides, Lesbian Crimes and Transcides of NonUnaDiMeno ( https://osservatorionazionale.nonunadimeno.net/ ) is very different: 32 femicides, 2 induced suicides of women, 1 suicide of a trans girl, 63 attempted femicides.
If ever there was any need, this comparison confirms yet another use of criminal law as a tool for emotional response and propaganda to gain consensus.
But even these first months of implementation reveal a much more serious issue: the vagueness of the law and its biased parameters, from a legal perspective, leads to a reduction in cases and therefore a denial of their original origin: the patriarchal culture based on gender binarism.
At NonUnaDiMeno Observatory, every femicide, lesbian murder, transcide, and murder of a sex worker is told for what it is, not just counted. Every femicide is an indictment of the male who killed, the male who refused to accept the freedom of the person he claimed to love, the male who cannot stand being alone, the male who refuses to accept a caring role.
It must be reiterated once again that this is not an emergency. Gender-based violence and male violence against women are not emergencies; they are entirely structural, deeply rooted in this sexist society. It is an entire social, cultural, and economic system, from north to south, from east to west, based on male power, based on control and possession, in every sense, in every declination, and at every possible level. It is patriarchy.
Femicide inherently embodies the distortion of a power relationship in which the victim of violence cannot, and has not, throughout the relationship, long or short, protest, escape, or decide to distance themselves. Femicides and gender-based violence are preceded by toxic relationships where the sequence is always the same: control - possession - abandonment - death: always the same in every femicide, lesbian murder, and murder of a sex worker.
Yet there's always someone who, denying the evidence, stands up and loudly proclaims that "femicide" and "elder murder" don't exist, unfortunately finding widespread support. But why? Denying means absolving oneself because the crime doesn't exist, and often, it even means blaming the victim, because she didn't "be a good person by avoiding danger," because "if she doesn't want it to happen, it won't happen."
Thus, femicides and gender-based violence are perceived as "events" that happen to other people, but which cannot happen to me, cannot happen to my family, cannot happen to my daughter and my friends.
Denying femicide is the macho and fascist defense of a patriarchal system that wants to maintain itself as such.
The toxic narrative of violence is also a form of denial of femicide. Articles and media outlets often report "happy" images of the couple, with her smiling and embracing her killer. It also happened with Lorena, killed and thrown from an overpass; it happened with Anna Scala, stabbed to death and left in the trunk. And with many others. It's that toxic narrative that always speaks of love, that "he couldn't live without her": it obscures the sequence that characterizes femicide: possession, violence, control. The term "love" romanticizes violent relationships, in which men kill because they refuse to lose control over the bodies and lives of those they consider "their" women, and so they kill them, often taking their own lives afterwards, securing for themselves possession, domination, and control forever. When these violent and murderous perpetrators take their own lives, they are often described as "deeply distressed and affected by the relationship": phrases we read in the newspapers and that we often hear echoing in courtrooms.
If anyone ever believed that a law like the one establishing the crime of femicide was enough to acknowledge the existence of gender-based violence in this system, let us say that this law, which dismisses gender-based violence in exclusively punitive (and selective) terms, is the product of a system that fails to question the sexist and patriarchal nature of violence, a system all the more oppressive and hateful at this stage, in which the triad of God, Country, Family represents the guidelines for keeping women and all non-cis heterosexual men nailed to the role of caretaker, to reproduce cannon fodder and labor.
Claudia Scotto
https://umanitanova.org/la-violenza-non-e-unemergenza-a-proposito-di-femminicidi/
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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