When faced with murdered women, the numbers are not neutral either. Words are even less so. And this also applies to the language of judgments. It is not uncommon, in fact, that stereotypes and prejudices emerge between paragraphs and articles of the penal code. And so it may happen that the “delusion of jealousy” even becomes a mitigating factor in a murder case.
This was revealed by a survey carried out by the Senate commission on femicide and gender-based violence, which analyzed the cases that occurred in the 2017-2018 two-year period, taking into consideration not only the numbers of the phenomenon, but also the language used in the minutes of the judicial police and in the judgments of judges.
One of the most evident criticalities in the acts of the investigative phase is the insufficient search for the gender motive, that is, of a possible relationship of oppression of the murderer towards the victim.
In some of the cases considered it emerges that those who make the investigations are unable to distinguish between domestic violence and family quarrel and so, in the service notes, it happens to read that the intervention served to “calm the spirits”. In short, violence is often reduced to family conflicts, and it happens that the obsessive forms of control by men towards their partners are trivialized as “jealousy”. Another not secondary factor is that often the investigative methods used are the same as those applied to any murder and have the aim of verifying the dynamics of death as a single fact, as an episode, and not as the result of a long sequence of attacks.
Thus, even if in most of the cases analyzed the man told the judicial police that his wife did not want to cook or wanted to ask for separation, these statements were not considered as signs of a climate of violence and oppression.
For example, the investigation relates the case of a law enforcement agent who, urged to take action, thought it was enough to have a coffee with the man and invite him “to be patient” to avoid a tragedy. And, instead, a few months later the perpetrator of the violence killed the two daughters and shot his wife. In the service report drawn up after the massacre, the judicial police, to describe what happened in the previous months, continued to use terms such as parties in disagreement, marital conflict, and “in any case not beyond the average found in disputes of this type”.
In the subsequent stages of the procedure, things do not change. Some cases have been talked about because the sentences have caused a lot of discussion.
In October 2018 Cristina Maioli was stabbed to death by her husband. The prosecution asked for a life sentence, but the Brescia court of assizes acquitted the man because he was unable to understand and want because of what the defense lawyer called “a delusion of jealousy”. In March 2019, the Bologna Court of Appeal almost halved the sentence of Michele Castaldo, a self-confessed murderer of Olga Matei, strangled, because she acted “in the throes of an emotional storm”. In this case, it was the Supreme Court that changed the outcome of the affair, which canceled the penalty discount.
The analysis of the Senate commission shows that these are not isolated cases. From the reading of most of the judgments examined, for example, it emerges that the past violent conduct of men towards women is classified as a “stormy, tumultuous, turbulent, difficult, unstable, uneventful relationship, characterized by domestic conflicts, all of them other than happy ”, and this even though the victim had previously filed complaints for ill-treatment.
There is also a distorted use of the sphere of feelings. In some sentences, femicide is considered a consequence of an impulse explained by resorting to emotional language. Often, then, it happens that the victims are called by name, while the defendants by surname: a difference in treatment that has implications that are not only linguistic and that has no legal basis.
Furthermore, the murdered women are almost never described in relation to the social or professional context, but mostly in relation to the family role and therefore as mothers, wives or daughters. Victims of femicide who engaged in prostitution are often referred to only as prostitutes, with no name or surname.
For the perpetrator of the murder, things work the other way around. Thus, if there is a condition of social discomfort, such as drug addiction or alcohol addiction, gambling addiction, job loss or illness, this circumstance is highlighted, as if to justify the guilty’s actions.
Another interesting fact that emerges from the analysis of the Senate commission is the frequent use of a strongly victimizing language towards the elderly mothers killed by their children, often defined as symbiotic or oppressive.