Italy Passes Landmark Femicide Law

01.12.2025

Italy Passes Landmark Femicide Law

Context

Italy has passed a landmark law legally recognising femicide, the killing of women due to gender, making it punishable with life imprisonment.

About the News

The new legislation establishes femicide as a distinct legal category and mandates stringent penalties, reflecting a critical shift in how Italy addresses gender-based violence.

What is Femicide?

• Femicide refers to the intentional killing of women because of their gender, often by intimate partners, family members, or other perpetrators.
• The motive is fundamentally driven by control, misogyny, or patriarchal norms.

Key Features of the Law:

• Gender-Motivated Crime: The law recognises the violence as rooted in a systemic power imbalance, coercion, and control over women.
• Three Recognised Categories: The crime is categorized to reflect the relationship between the victim and the perpetrator:
  • Partner-related
  • Family-related
  • Non-family perpetrators
• Separate Legal Recognition: The law acknowledges that gender identity forms a central motive behind the crime, warranting separate classification from general homicide.
• Penalty: Femicide is punishable with life imprisonment.

Significance of Criminalising Femicide

Legal and Policy Impact:

• Legal Recognition: It creates an official legal recognition of gender-specific motives and patterns of violence, enabling specific prosecution strategies.
• Data Generation: It helps generate official, disaggregated statistics on gender-based killings, which are crucial for shaping targeted policy responses, prevention programs, and resource allocation.

Societal and Cultural Impact:

• Public Awareness: It improves public understanding of the dangerous progression from toxic masculinity, control, and harassment to patterns that ultimately lead to gendered killings.
• Accountability: The severe penalty reinforces societal condemnation of violence against women and holds perpetrators specifically accountable for gender-based crimes.

Global and Regional Context

International Standard:

• The law aligns with international human rights standards, such as those promoted by the Istanbul Convention (Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence), which requires state parties to address gender-based violence comprehensively.

European Trend:

• Italy joins a growing number of countries that have introduced specific legislation or aggravated circumstances for femicide, signalling a regional commitment to tackling this endemic issue.

Conclusion

Italy's new femicide law is a pivotal moment in the fight against gender-based violence, moving beyond general homicide to specifically penalise the killing of women rooted in misogyny and patriarchal control. By legally naming and severely punishing femicide, the state is taking a crucial step toward protecting women and challenging the cultural norms that enable such violence.