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Professor Saccà, what conclusions have you drawn from your research?
In the first part of the academic research project “STEP, Stereotypes and Prejudice,” we identified 282 sentences published between 2017 and 2019, collected by a group of female lawyers, magistrates, and prosecutors, which included cases of bad practice.
We cannot indicate what percentage they represent in relation to the total number of judgments, as there is no consultable national register of gender-related judgments in Italy. But even though the figures are not statistically reliable, these judgments are still very significant. They show that patriarchal stereotypes and prejudice influence trials by reproducing and reinforcing power asymmetries between men and women, which are at the root of secondary and tertiary victimization.
What is the difference between the two?
Secondary victimization occurs when a country’s institutions and cultural production system tend to want to divide responsibility for a crime between the victim and the perpetrator. When establishing the facts, this involves determining to what extent the victim contributed to their situation: were they dressed provocatively? Were they behaving in a frustrating manner? Were they cheating on their partner? Were they drunk?
This type of mentality fuels a completely distorted and stereotypical narrative that invades the public sphere, to the point of even influencing courtrooms: in the analyzed judgments, patriarchal culture often prevails over the penal code. Culturally, if men and women are not considered equal, as individuals with the same rights, and if women—even when they are victims—are treated differently, this predisposes the judicial system to view them as less than men, to consider them less as victims, and even to partly hold them responsible for the crimes committed against them. So it is more difficult for women to obtain justice. This is why, when a victim files a complaint and the court does not deliver justice, we speak of tertiary victimization.
What does the term “himpathy” mean?
When, for example, a judge shows empathy towards the perpetrator of a femicide, this is “himpathy”—a term coined by Australian philosopher Kate Manne to describe the flow of empathy withdrawn from women victims of violence and redirected to their attackers. I think this perfectly explains how a series of rhetorical constructs, both in the press and in the courts, tend to absolve violent men of responsibility by granting them a whole series of mitigating circumstances. And some cases are really alarming.
Could you give us some examples?
The Assize Court of Modena recently recognized general mitigating circumstances for Salvatore Montefusco, sentencing him to 30 years in prison for shooting and killing his wife, Gabriela Trandafir, 47, and her daughter, Renata, 22, for “humanly understandable reasons.”
In the first STEP 2017-2019 project, we also analyzed a case in which the judge wrote that the murderer, a man known to be violent, had done everything he could to control himself, while the woman, who was drunk, was yelling at him, which must have exasperated him to the point of pushing him to commit this extreme act. The poor man, unable to bear the situation any longer, was seized by a fit of homicidal madness that led him to grab a knife and kill her. We know that homicidal madness does not exist, scientifically speaking. But in the absence of witnesses, the judge had reconstructed the scene in his imagination based on his preconceived ideas about the woman, which explains why, in the first part of the sentence, the blame was placed on her.
What are the most common biases in the judgments you have analyzed?
A widespread bias concerns the type of victim: if she is “irreproachable,” as in the case of Giulia Cecchettin, judges and journalists are more inclined to recognize her as such. If, on the other hand, the victims are adult, emancipated, free women who defy social norms, a certain moral judgment prevails. People are more severe towards a prostitute or a transgender or homosexual person. Another preconceived attitude, that of romanticizing the situation, is very dangerous—if we believe that the murderer loved his victim very much and was therefore jealous, if we say that he killed her when she left him, then we confuse love with possession, passion with abuse of power, jealousy with violence. Referring to a fit of madness is also very common, though fortunately increasingly rare, at least according to the latest report from our Independent Media Observatory. The results of the 2024 study “Quei bravi ragazzi” (Those Good Guys) show that in the 3,671 articles analyzed in 25 national daily newspapers, the term appears in only 3% of cases.
But it is important to note that this figure rises to 34% when the victims of femicide are elderly or dependent on their spouses. We studied the case of a woman whom the press described as depressed: after 30 years of marriage, her husband allegedly decided to kill her “to free her from her suffering.” Another woman, who was disabled and had long been unable to wash herself or move around on her own and who was killed by her husband, had her murder described almost as an act of kindness.
Studying different types of suicide, sociologist Émile Durkheim defined as “altruistic” those who take their own lives because they consider themselves a burden on their families and society. We find the same interpretive framework in the femicides of elderly women by men who, instead of helping them more, killed them. What would happen if the opposite occurred? If a woman killed her depressed, sick, or dependent husband? The social representation of this would certainly be very different.
How can we reverse this trend?
Over the past 20 years, the Spanish model has clearly demonstrated that emotional education in schools and training for judges, lawyers, and police officers are essential to curbing this phenomenon, as is the creation of courts specializing in gender-based violence. We also offer training courses for media professionals, lawyers, magistrates, and law enforcement officers with the aim of creating conscious professionals, but there is still much to be done.
