Italy Passes a Femicide Law, Seeking to Prevent Violence Against Women

Murders of women killed for misogynistic reasons will now be classified as femicide. Campaigners say a broader cultural shift is still needed.

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.

From now on, the murders of women killed for misogynistic reasons in Italy will be defined as femicide.

The law’s proponents say the move, though largely symbolic, will make it easier to quantify and improve awareness about the scale of misogynistic violence in Italy. Of 73 women who were murdered in Italy in the first nine months of the year, more than half were killed by a former or current partner, according to the Interior Ministry.

As the votes were being tallied, members of the opposition jangled their house keys, a gesture honoring Giulia Cecchettin, a 22-year-old university student who was killed by her ex-boyfriend in November 2023.

Ms. Cecchettin’s violent death touched a nerve in Italy and amplified calls for a femicide law. Protests in her name often involved the jangling of house keys, a symbol of the fight against patriarchal violence, because, feminists say, in many cases, these crimes take place in a domestic context.

Filippo Turetta, Ms. Cecchettin’s ex-boyfriend, was convicted of her murder in 2024, and he is serving now a life sentence.

The new crime of femicide — which was adopted on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women — applies to murders where women are killed as an “act of hatred or discrimination,” or “an act of control or possession or domination.”

It also applies when a woman is killed because she wants out of a romantic relationship or in cases where there is an attempt to limit her “individual freedoms.”

After Cyprus, Malta and Croatia, Italy is now the fourth European Union country to have introduced a legal definition of femicide in its criminal code. According to the World Bank, France, Spain and Portugal also have laws that address femicide.

The femicide law was spearheaded by the government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s conservative coalition. Its introduction “sends a strong message of social condemnation against this phenomenon,” said Giulia Bongiorno, a lawmaker from the League, a party in the governing coalition.

The law also sends a message to men who committed femicide that they would pay for the crime in full, Ms. Bongiorno said. “There’s no law that eliminates violence, but this is a good deterrent,” she said.

Critics say that the law does not go far enough. Deeply rooted chauvinistic attitudes in Italy have heightened the challenges of addressing violence against women — so campaigners say the law should be accompanied by better education about gender issues, as well as better training for prosecutors and law enforcement to deal with domestic abuse.

The government, they say, has not allocated the funds that would make such education and training possible. Frustrated by the law’s limitations, one national anti-violence network run by women’s organizations, D.i.Re, pulled its involvement in parliamentary hearings to discuss the bill.

“It’s important from a symbolic point of view that a law of this type has been passed,” and that it passed unanimously, said Laura Onofri Grisetti, the president of Se Non Ora Quando (If Not Now When) in Turin, a network of women’s rights committees.

“But then, as we’ve been saying for many years, laws are not enough if they are not supported by other tools,” she added.

“We come from an atavistic culture in which patriarchy exists, and we see it in many contexts of society,” handed down from generation to generation, Ms. Onofri said.

Groups like hers have been going into schools for years to promote “a culture of respect” toward women but such efforts were hardly entrenched in the national curricula, as they should be, she said.

Valeria Torre, a professor at the University of Foggia, said that only by giving women greater access to the labor market, offering working women greater support and reversing one of the most imbalanced gender wage gaps in Europe, can disparity be overcome. “Incarceration should be the last tool not the only one,” she said.

She also believed that the law would face legal challenges in court because the definition of what constitutes femicide was “too vague” and “hard to prove legally” while criminal law needs “very clear concepts.”

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