WUNRN
ITALY - DOMESTIC HOMICIDES OF WOMEN
ON THE RISE
By Barbie Latza Nadeau - October 22,
2012
“Giuliana,” 46, who does not want to give her
real name for her own safety, has been hiding in a shelter for battered women
in a dingy Roman suburb since July, when her husband tried to kill her with a
12-inch kitchen knife. She received more than 50 stitches on her hands from
trying to fight off the attack. She miraculously escaped when a neighbor heard
her screams and called the police. Her body gives testimony to more than 20
years of hell. Her arms are scarred from the cigarettes her husband
extinguished on her bare skin. Her nose is twisted from being broken three
times. She is missing a toenail from when he ground her foot into the marble
floor with his work boot. But despite all her visible cicatrices, her internal
scars are worse. She is insecure and terrified he will find her and finish her
off. “He is waiting for me out there,” she says, chain-smoking nervously. “I
can’t go back home now because he will kill me for running away.” Like 90
percent of Italian victims of domestic violence, Giuliana has refused to press
charges out of fear of retaliation. But Giuliana is lucky to be alive.
Vanessa Scialfa, 20, made a fatal
mistake last spring when she accidentally called her 34-year-old boyfriend,
Francesco Lo Presti, by the wrong name. In a fit of jealous rage, he took the
cord from the DVD player and strangled her to death in their home in
Since Jan. 1, at least 100 women have been killed in
To be fair,
Laws may
make it easier to prosecute femicides, but they clearly don’t protect women
from harm. That will only come from the epic task of changing the country’s
mentality. Lorella Zanardo has made a huge impact in Italian society with her
shock doc Corpo delle Donne (Body of a Woman) and her recent book
Senza Chiedere il Permesso (Without Asking Permission) about how
the oversexualization of women in the media is destroying the society. She
believes that as women are increasingly viewed as role models and portrayed on
television and in the media in the boardrooms instead of the bedrooms, men fear
their own wives, girlfriends, and even mothers will start getting ideas, too.
“This increase is because of the inability of men to accept that we are
standing before an epochal change in this country. This means that after
millennia in which women had a subordinate and inferior role, today women are
taking decision-making roles both within the family and in organizations,” she
told Newsweek. “It’s not easy for men: until now it has been enough to just be
male to ensure that they would find a woman or two who only had one wish: to be
married. Now men are faced with having to respect and relate to women, and to
listen. And it’s not easy for them.”
Indeed, women in Italy
have long suffered from a misguided perception that they are not equal to men,
enforced by dominant fathers, husbands, and even sons and backed up by some of
the most sexist primetime television on air anywhere in the world. But things are
improving quickly. And as the perception changes and women finally start
feeling self-worth and self-confidence in their relationships, the gap widens
because men aren’t being reeducated as quickly, and that’s when the trouble
begins. “When a woman says no, and takes away that security that she will be
there forever, the self-image of the man falls apart,” Serughetti says. “The
inability to accept that the girlfriend, wife, lover, mother of their children
has a mind of their own triggers the murderous rampage that would be very
simplistic and misleading to call excess of love, jealousy, or insanity. But
it’s actually insecurity.”
When Gabriela
Moscatelli opened the domestic-violence hotline Telefona Rosa 25 years ago, she
says almost no one called. “They kept the dirty laundry of domestic violence
within the walls of the home,” she told Newsweek. Now the center
counsels close to 1,200 women a year who are in chronically abusive situations,
helping them get into safer settings that didn’t exist a quarter century ago.
Still, the numbers are worrying. Italy’s national statistical agency, ISTAT,
estimates that one in three women between the ages of 16 and 70 in Italy are
victims of chronic domestic violence. Moscatelli says she sees a direct
connection between how women are perceived publicly and how they are treated
privately, and sometimes it is even the women who are high-achieving outside
the home who pay the biggest price when they get home. “When a man considers a
woman his object and she suddenly rebels and challenges him or does not accept
what he says, there is an escalation of emotion that leads to the violence,”
Moscatelli told Newsweek. “And it is just one short step from escalated
violence to femicide. And by then it’s too late.”