Violence against women, two more feminicides in less than 24 hours: let's not call it an emergency

First Aneta Danelczyk, 50 years old. Then Li Xuemei, 36 years old. In less than 24 hours in Italy two women were killed by their husbands. This is why when we talk about violence against women and feminicides we can no longer talk about an emergency. But of a phenomenon that is internal to our society. It has foundations that need to be undermined. Aneta Danelczyk she was stabbed to death while she was at her home in Taurisano, near Lecce. It was her ex-husband, Albano Galati, who fatally struck her, from whom she had decided to separate and was doing so. After killing his wife, the man turned himself in to the police force and in the police station offices he confessed to the crime in front of the prosecutor on duty, Giorgia Villa. When Aneta died it was around 5.30pm on March 16th.

A few hours later, around 11.30 pm, about six hundred kilometers away, Li Xuemei she was found lifeless inside her apartment in Rome. She was killed in front of the eyes of her 5-year-old daughter, by a stab thrown by her husband, the woman's peer, during an argument. Two Chinese girls to whom the couple had rented a room in their apartment asked for help by running into the street, but when the police arrived, Li Xuemei was already dead. The man immediately ran away from the house but shortly after the officers, who found the murder weapon during the search, identified him and arrested him.

«Relating to the period 1 January – 3 March 2024, 60 murders were recorded, with 20 female victims, of which 18 were killed in a family/emotional context; of these, 8 died at the hands of their partner/ex-partner”, we read in the Weekly Report of the Criminal Analysis Service of the Central Directorate of the Criminal Police. A figure which updated to 10 March 2024 reaches the number of 21 victims of which 18 were killed in the family-emotional context and 9 in particular by their partner or ex. Year after year, the data relating to violence against women remains alarming. They don't have big declines, on average a woman is killed every four days. In total in 2023 there were 120 feminicides. In 64 cases, more than half, the murderer was the husband, boyfriend, partner or exJust as the almost daily news tells us, we are no longer faced with an emergency but with a phenomenon that is structural and which requires an immediate response from the institutions, primarily in economic terms, which also takes responsibility for the change cultural that can no longer be postponed and which calls into question the community as a whole.

To do this it is also necessary to start with words and their precise use. The ministerial report does not speak of “feminicides” but rather considers the murders as a whole. Why? The word feminicide must be used because it is the first fact from which to start. It was chosen by Treccani as the word of the year for 2023 and is necessary precisely because of the cultural value it contains and the change it can encourage. And to remind ourselves why, just don't reread the words of Michela Murgia: «The word feminicide does not indicate the sex of the deceased. A woman killed during a robbery is not femicide. Feminicides are women killed because they refused to behave according to the expectations that men of a patriarchal society have of women. Saying murder just tells us that someone died. Saying feminicide also tells us why. The death of women, at the hands of men, as women. It is feminicide when the woman is killed within a relationship of domination by a man who claims possession of her. And therefore it indicates a cultural fact.” All of us, as the writer Valeria Parrella said in an embrace made of words to Elena Cecchettin, we can become Antigone.