The Giulia Cecchettin Femicide: Will Italy Finally Face Down Gender Violence?

Not a sudden outburst

Elena Cecchettin narrated the violence done to her sister and exposed what should be obvious to all of us: femicides are the tip of the iceberg for the violence and oppression that affects millions of women everywhere in the world. It is something each woman knows and fears since birth.

Violence serves to restore the hierarchy that some women have dared to question.

Femicides are not the products of sudden outbursts, as experts have been trying to explain for years. They are preceded by a crescendo of physical and psychological abuse, manipulation attempts, blackmail, stalking, gaslighting, obsessive and controlling behaviors that can go on for months or years, mostly tolerated by society.

As Elena says, violence serves to restore the hierarchy that some women have dared to question; it is an expression of a millennia-old power system in crisis but still deeply rooted in everyday behavior.

Often, women and girls seeking help are not believed, and the warning signs they raise are neglected until the story ends with tragic outcomes. "Filippo asked her to stop attending her exams; it was the first warning bell," recounts Elena.

Giulia was killed five days before receiving her degree in biomedical engineering at the University of Padua. This was an achievement Giulia had managed despite the many family problems caused by the illness of her mother, who passed away six months before. Her goal to obtain a degree had caused a crisis in Filippo, her study partner, according to reports from the girl's family. Filippo did not want Giulia to graduate before him.

Massive rallies around Italy on Saturday to denounce femicide

A fear of female independence

In her book Amore E Violenza, Il Fattore Molesto Della Civiltà (Love and Violence, the Annoying Factor of Civilization), writer and feminist Lea Melandri says: "There are unsuspected kinships that many do not recognize or prefer to ignore. The oldest and most enduring of these is the one that links love to hate, tenderness to anger, life to death."

As women reach unprecedented levels of autonomy, murders and violence against them are multiplying.

People destroy to preserve, kill for what they have been taught to call love, but which is not love. "Instead of merely calling for harsher penalties for the attackers, perhaps it would be wiser to take a look at those areas of personal life that deal with the most intimate relationships, where everything is most familiar to us but not necessarily better known. Those who kill, rape, and subjugate are predominantly husbands, sons, fathers, lovers unable to tolerate domestic walls that are either too protective or not protective enough, suffocating embraces, or abandonments that reveal unexpected male vulnerabilities," writes Melandri.

But at a time when women seem to have reached unprecedented levels of autonomy and participation in the public space, murders and violence against them are multiplying. Even those who have achieved higher levels of education and finally gained access to equal opportunity still seem exposed to the ferocity of male violence, which seeks to regress everyone to centuries of subordination and dependence.

Historian Vanessa Roghi recalls that in the essay A Room of One's Own, writer Virginia Woolf reflects on the anger with which men write about women. Roghi explains that Woolf "comes to the conclusion that when a woman studies, writes, or simply expresses independent thought, she deprives man of his image of her, which is only a mirror he uses to reflect himself off of."

This is why even the most independent of women can become victims of heinous violence: it is their "no" that triggers anger, breaking a pact of submission that has lasted for millennia.

"Hence the enormous importance to a patriarch who has to conquer, who has to rule, of feeling that great numbers of people, half the human race indeed, are by nature inferior to himself. It must indeed be one of the chief sources of his power," writes Woolf in her feminist classic.

"Burn everything"

Even in an era when feminism is widespread and diverse, even mainstream, violence does not stop. All of its battles seem to have been momentarily in vain, in the face of a 22-year-old girl stabbed to death.

But in this moment of disorientation, it becomes clearer that change must be radical; there can be no gradualness. It is not about amending or reforming something but about changing everything.

" Femicide is not a crime of passion; it is a crime of power. We need widespread sexual and emotional education; we need to teach that love is not possession. We must fund anti-violence centers and provide opportunity for those in need to seek help. For Giulia, don't take a minute of silence. For Giulia, burn everything," concluded Elena Cecchettin, quoting a viral poem by Peruvian activist Cristina Torres-Cáceres.

But the girl was inundated with insults.

Stefano Valdegamberi, the League councillor in the Veneto region, accused Elena Cecchettin of being "ideological" and then posted images taken from her Facebook profile, writing that she "promotes symbols of Satanism."

Meanwhile, Italy's first female prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has promised a new law and more investments for prevention projects, while the Minister of Education and Merit, Giuseppe Valditara, has said that new guidelines will be approved to promote gender violence prevention in schools. However, feminist organizations have pointed out that in the last year, the funds allocated by Meloni's right-wing government for such activities have been reduced by 70%.

Funding prevention

"Despite the increase in funds recorded in the last decade, the number of women killed by men within the family has remained essentially stable over time. This suggests the inadequacy of the anti-violence policies adopted," is written in the latest report from the NGO ActionAid Prevenzione Sottocosto, presented on November 13. Nearly 7 million women have experienced physical violence in their lifetime, more than 2 million have been victims of stalking, and millions have had to deal with psychological or economic abuse, according to Istat, the Italian National Institute of Statistics.

More than a quarter of the world's population finds it justifiable for a man to physically abuse his partner.

According to ActionAid, between 2020 and 2023, approximately 248.8 million euros were allocated to resources against gender violence. But only 12% of these funds were dedicated to prevention. "For interventions in education and awareness that aim to dismantle social norms and behaviors that produce and reproduce violence, only 5.6% of the total anti-violence funds for the three-year period have been allocated."

According to the United Nations' Gender Social Norms Index, which measures stereotypes and beliefs that produce gender inequalities, more than a quarter of the world's population finds it justifiable for a man to physically abuse his partner.

Italy has particularly concerning data: 61.5% of the population holds prejudices against women, and 45% has beliefs that may lead to justifying physical, sexual, and psychological violence by a partner.

"Only cultural work that counters customs and patterns of violence against women and girls can reverse the trend," states the ActionAid report. But in the last year, funds have fallen by 70%: "It has gone from over 17 million euros in 2022 to five million for 2023."

Taking a minute of silence is not enough. Elena Cecchettin is right: everything needs to be redone, and as quickly as possible.

For all the Giulia out there to save

"In Italy, we are experiencing a new important opportunity to raise public awareness once again about men's violence against women, this age-old and contemporary social phenomenon," says Elisa Ercoli, president of Differenza Donna, an association that has been fighting gender-based violence since 1989.

"Women want to get out of situations of violence they have suffered. Regulations are increasing to protect them, measures and policies are increasing but we still have great difficulty in making these many tools and opportunities a certainty and a system. We lack a culture that needs to advance and involve everyone, women and men, in a cultural advancement that ensures the application of norms and policies. We need a homogeneous reading of the phenomenon, to share languages, theoretical backgrounds. We need not to get stuck in gender stereotypes and prejudices that are endorsed by gender discrimination that is what constitutes the power disparity between men and women," Ercoli says.

Today, the association manages 1522, the national anti-violence and stalking hotline, along with 14 anti-violence centers and six shelters scattered throughout Italy, that provide help to women and their children who are victims of violence, guaranteeing privacy and anonymity. There is also a team of women workers, educators and psychologists, all strictly women as stipulated in the Istanbul Convention, as well as 23 lawyers experienced in civil, criminal, labor and immigration law.

Unfortunately, the number cases does not seem to be declining, but more and more women are gaining courage and reporting, giving concrete evidence of the cross-sectional awareness that has been growing since the November 2023 demonstrations. By October of the same year, 1522 had recorded 3,666 calls, which only a month later tripled to nearly 10,000 by the end of 2023.

Numbers to unveil decades of mistakes

Numbers that are frightening, but at the same time reveal the courage of nearly 6,000 women who, to the chant of "If it’s my turn tomorrow, I want to be the last." have found the strength to name their uneasy and dangerous situation, to put themselves in harm's way and to "burn it all down."

Ercoli added, "We must unravel the misinterpretations of violence that thousands of years have normalized. We must put on every men and women, institutions and civil society, those glasses that make the view clear. As it did in the aftermath of Giulia Cecchettin's femicide where it became clear to everybody that violence is transversal, that even just psychological violence can result in femicide, and that violence is among us and not far from us."

"Without this cultural advancement, without interrupting the intergenerational chain of traditional values of stereotypical gender roles, without understanding the seriousness and prevalence of male violence against women, there is no law that will hold. And its non-enforcement lets in new forms of institutional violence to add to the dose of power disparity between men and women in our country," Ercoli said.