Stop ignoring violence against women in Italy

opinion

by Christine Rosen

When the stabbed body of Italian university student Giulia Cecchettin, 22, was found in a ditch near Venice in November 2023, police arrested her ex-boyfriend, Filippo Turetta, on suspicion of murder.

Such intimate partner violence is not uncommon, and Cecchettin was one of more than 100 women killed by a former or current intimate partner in Italy last year, according to Italy’s Interior Ministry.

What was unusual was the public outcry over Cecchettin’s death, which quickly became a symbol of the country’s ongoing crisis of femicide, the crime of killing women simply because they are women. .

The article dominated Italian media for several weeks. More than 10,000 people gathered for Cecchettin’s funeral, sparking protests and vigils across the country by Italians demanding greater legal and social protection for women.

But Cecchettin’s death, and the protests it sparked, are a huge hit in a country with significant rates of intimate partner violence (and Italy, which was visited by more than 6 million Americans in 2019). Here in the United States, which is a country with a history of

According to an analysis of 2018 FBI homicide statistics by the Violence Policy Center, “In cases of homicide where the relationship between the victim and perpetrator can be identified, 92% of female victims were killed by a male acquaintance.” “63% of female murder victims were the murderer’s wife or close acquaintance.”

In some cases, stories of women killed by their partners gain public attention, such as the case of Gabby Pettit, who was killed by her boyfriend during a road trip across the American West in 2021, but most often this Such murders — like the word “femicide” itself — are rarely mentioned in the mainstream media.

Why not?

Rather than consider the complex cultural and legal challenges of protecting women from violent partners, many observers prefer to politicize the issue, often along racial lines.

This has become a common feature of stories of violence against women in recent years.

For example, in a jargon-laden opinion piece published in the Washington Post in the wake of Petito’s disappearance, Wake Forest University gender studies professor Julia S. I complained about the content. She said it was inflicted on black women and decried the “systematic marginalization and devaluation of black women by society.”

What Jordan-Zachery didn’t mention, perhaps because it didn’t suit her story, is that while black women endure higher levels of intimate partner violence than white women, they are vaguely It is not the “organized violence” that led to these attacks, but the fact that they are being carried out at the hands of black men. ” Power.

In Cecchettin’s case, she did not fit neatly into the hierarchy of oppression currently used to determine the suitability of victims. It was also, implicitly, used to determine whether a victim was worthy of attention in a context steeped in the identity politics of American mass media.

Consider another, more egregious incident. The women who were attacked and kidnapped by Hamas during the Israeli invasion on October 7 were not sexually assaulted, it is claimed.

As details of the horrific attack became public, witnesses pointed out how Hamas terrorists raped and tortured many of their victims, a fact that was confirmed by forensic evidence found at the scene and by the terrorists themselves. This was quickly corroborated by a video taken by

Despite this, international organizations such as UN Women were unable to issue a statement condemning Hamas until more than 50 days after the attack. The social media post was then quickly deleted and replaced with a more vitriolic call for the hostages to be released.

Progressive media was equally weak.

in guardian For example, in a column last week titled “The Year of Patriarchy,” Arwa Mahadali complained that “a humanitarian crisis has broken out in Gaza, with women and children bearing the brunt of the conflict.” “Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Gaza has attacked Gaza,” he said. ”

Remains unmentioned?

Hamas’s invasion of Israel and the rape, torture, and murder of women and children there;

There was also no mention of the prevalence of femicide in Italy, although Prime Minister Mahadali managed to highlight the “movement by the far-right government of Giorgia Meloni…to erode LGBTQ+ rights.”

Meanwhile, former Bernie Sanders spokeswoman Brianna Joy Gray said on social media platforms such as X that no one has provided evidence that Hamas terrorists have raped and assaulted Israeli women and children. I denied it.

“This is not a ‘believe the woman’ scenario because the female victim did not testify,” she posted.

This is because most of the victims were murdered.

Later, she wrote, “Zionists want us to believe the uncorroborated eyewitness accounts of *men* who describe alleged rape victims in bizarre and fetishistic terms,” ​​and describe their own rapes. He further strengthened his denialism.

Because Israeli women, and therefore Jewish women, do not register on the victimology scale of Gray and other progressive activists, their suffering is often dismissed in order to promote a favorable narrative of Israel as an oppressor. considered to be suspicious or invisible.

Indisputable evidence of the horrors done to these women is readily available, as outlined in a recent New York Times investigation into rape and sexual assault by Hamas. However, deniers will be rewarded with rape denialism.

This comes at a heavy price. A culture that challenges violence against women only when women check for correct identification or when it is politically advantageous for their tribe undermines efforts to protect all women from violence and undermines women’s It tries to deny its moral power. Cecchettin’s family and the family of an Israeli woman raped and murdered by Hamas are demanding justice for her loved ones.

Christine Rosen is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.