WUNRN
ITALY
In
Southern Europe, more and more women are murdered by men who supposedly love
them!
Feb 17, 2013
The 21-year-old woman
known only as “A” sat in a courtroom in central
The young woman, a student,
had been violently raped by a man she trusted; then left for dead in a pool of
her own blood in a snow bank outside a club one winter evening last year.
Miraculously, she survived the attack, though the operation to reconstruct her
vagina and repair her cervix and uterus took many hours. Her assailant had used
an unidentified blunt object during the rape, the doctor testified.
Francesco
Tuccia, 22, the man eventually convicted of her rape, asked if he could leave
the courtroom during the doctor’s graphic testimony, and was escorted out. His
victim stayed as Tuccia’s lawyers argued that he had only used his hands, and
that her injuries were due to her petite stature. This, his lawyers argued, was
a “loving relationship between two consenting adults.” Tuccia’s passions may
have been unbridled, they said, but were certainly not malicious.
Because of Tuccia’s military service and lack of prior
criminal record, he was sentenced to just eight years in prison, part of which
he can spend under house arrest. Meanwhile, “A” may never recover from the
psychological effects of the rape—the details of which she has suppressed and
which only appear in disturbing flashes. Her wounds will take more surgery to
repair and she is in chronic pain. And it is unclear whether she will ever be
able to bear children. It feels like, she told the court, that she was the one
handed a life sentence. “I want my life to be like it was before, but I can
never return to that,” she said. “I want to be able to be free, to not be
afraid to leave my house. He took that away from me.”
The attack on “A” isn’t unusual. Rather, she is just one
among tens of thousands women who are victims of sexual assault in
As The Daily Beast reported last year, though violence
against women is finally getting the attention it deserves, the number of women
killed in Italy has been steadily growing—about 10 percent every year for the
past three years—a faster rate than any other European country, according to
Non Siamo Complici, or We Are Not Accomplices, a group that is working to
empower women to stand up to domestic violence.
Though statistics on femicide are hard to come by,
according to the United Nations,
50 percent of women killed between 2008 and 2010 in
(In
In many cases, men feel insecure or threatened because
their wives or girlfriends say no to sex or attempt to leave the relationship,
says Diana E. H. Russell, Ph.D., a Professor of Sociology at Mills College in
Oakland, California, and one of the world’s foremost experts on violence
against women. “It’s a macho acting-out of the attitude, ‘How dare you—you
inferior bitch—leave me!’” she says. It’s “acting out his feelings of
male superiority.”
Last year in
“From the burning of witches in the past to the more
recent widespread custom of female infanticide in many societies, to the
killing of women for ‘honor’… femicide has been going on a long time,” says
Russell who first testified about femicide at the International Tribunal of
Crimes against Women in Brussels in 1976. Her book Femicide: The Politics of Woman
Killing, resulted in the term being adopted in more
than 15 countries in
Femicides, Russell argues, are hate crimes, just like the
killing of people on account of race, sexual preference, or ethnicity. However,
in male-dominated societies—such as
“This is reflected in the laws as well as in the norms
and values,” she says. “Men are considered the head of “their” families, and
many believe their wives should be subservient to them. When their power is
threatened, many lash out violently.”
Women were shot, stabbed, burned alive and pushed off
balconies. Some were suffocated with pillow cases. Others were strangled by the
cords of electronic appliances. One Italian woman was stabbed with a stiletto
heel.
Barbara Spinelli, an Italian lawyer, teaches seminars on
the topic to other lawyers, social workers, police officers, teachers and those
who work and counsel battered women across
“The problem is that men aren’t able to accept the end of
a love story,” she says. “It’s not only a problem of power in the society; it’s
a problem of self-determination: nowhere in the world do men accept the loss of
control over the women’s life choices.” Spinelli believes part of the problem
is the distorted and stereotyped portrayal of women in the media as either
mothers or sex objects.
According to an unprecedented global 2012 study in the
American Political Science Review published by Cambridge University Press,
research “found astonishingly high rates of sexual assault, stalking,
trafficking, violence in intimate relationships, and other violations of
women.” According to the study’s co-author, S. Laurel Weldon, “in
Latin America, commonly perceived to have a bigger
problem than
Partly, that is due to a persistent cultural taboo and
the enduring acceptance of domestic violence as a private family matter.
“People tend to dismiss domestic violence—and even women are still
reluctant to report threats,” she said, pointing to a 1999 Eurobarometer report
that showed that 40 percent of European women accepted domestic violence as a
justifiable act.
In a survey taken in 2010, the numbers had much improved
with less than 10 percent harboring the same attitude. Still, the reluctance to
speak out is worrying. In the second survey, 91 percent of Italian women
reported that they believed domestic violence is a common occurrence in their
country, but there was nothing they could do about it.
The most effective way to combat femicide involves
eradicating misogyny and discrimination against women. As Weldon says:
“The problem with the criminal justice reaction is that you are just serving
victims. If you don’t find a way to prevent the abuse by changing the
mentality, you won’t actually solve the problem.”