Italy’s parliament on Tuesday approved a law that introduces femicide into the country’s criminal law and punishes it with life in prison.
The vote coincided with the international day for the elimination of violence against women, a day designated by the U.N. General Assembly.
The law won bipartisan support from the center-right majority and the center-left opposition in the final vote in the Lower Chamber, passing with 237 votes in favor.
The law, backed by the conservative government of Premier Giorgia Meloni, comes in response to a series of killings and other violence targeting women in Italy. It includes stronger measures against gender-based crimes including stalking and revenge porn.
You’re avoiding the question. I haven’t seen you give a real reason why it shouldn’t be symmetrical yet. I know that the motivation is greater to prosecute more common crimes, but ideally why would it not be symmetrical?
Because the real world isn’t symmetrical, there are millions of factors that impact trends, attitudes, cultures and so on. If you don’t respond to issues appropriate to that scaling you will have spikes in problems. This is very basic, this isn’t even sociology, it’s just how everything works. If you don’t enforce building codes in an area where more buildings are being made cheap, that area will have too many buildings that fall over, whereas areas where the building codes are being adhered to don’t need the extra resources diverted to keeping a non-existent problem in check.
If you drink more milk than juice, you should buy more milk.
I am struggling to understand how this is a hard concept to grasp. Do you have an emotional or personal connection to this topic that is making it hard to see practicality in how our entire society is built?
Not really, I just enjoy arguing against things that I don’t think make sense and for things that do.
A user elsewhere in this thread has made me see the point that you’re trying to make. I’m still not sure it makes sense to enshrine these differences in crime frequency towards different groups into law, but I do see the value in trying to tackle the problem from a gendered perspective in terms of trying to change the culture. So I am now split on whether the value of the law being better (symmetrical) outweighs the value of changing the culture by making a law targetted specifically for women.
How about you tell us why the legal system should be symmetrical if the situation isn’t? Why do the rich pay proportionally more tax than the poor? People are trying to make an unjust factual reality more just by acknowledging injustice is why.
You have this backwards. The poor pay proportionally more than the rich.
On a different note, I’d argue that the situation in question (murder) IS symmetrical.
yes, yes, I meant income tax specifically, proportionally to the aforementioned income.
Argue all you want though, factual reality is just there if you want to look at statistics, both for perpetrators and victims. If you meant like anyone can kill anyone, then money is also symmetrical in that anyone can get it and spend it in precisely the same way.
In terms of symmetry, I mean that specific to the outcome of murdering an individual. One death = one death. The end result of the act of murder is genderless.
Yes and 1$=1$. If you look at stuff in a vacuum everything is symmetrical, that’s a nothing statement.
Being rich is not an unchangeable identity nor a protected class; it is the result of one’s actions, and actions, unlike identity, must be treated differently by the law.
The legal situation should be symmetrical because for any individual victim, the frequency of crime done to various identity groups does not matter.
Related example: Rape is more commonly done to women. But male victims of rape should still be protected against it.
Unrelated hypothetical: Let’s say 80% of thievery was committed against women. Should men not also be protected against this crime just because it happens more often to another group of people?
I suppose you could make the argument that “the situation” is still not symmetrical, because women face more hate in their daily lives. But I fail to see how this should apply to the crime of murder or the punishment for its motivation.
It’s certainly true that femicide is a more important protection, as the majority of gender-motivated murder is committed against women (I have no proof for this, but it seems everyone here agrees on this). But that is not a good argument not to provide other genders with the same protections from hate-motivated murder in the form of longer sentences as well.
I have provided my argument, as asked. So again, I ask: Why in your opinion would it be worse to provide this protection to all genders?
If you look at the rates of social class transitions, you’ll find being rich or poor is not much less of an unchangeable identity than gender… But that’s not the point, you keep saying you don’t get the reasons why this law should be asymmetrical, so I’m trying to explain by analogy. The answer is equality is a bad foundation for lawmaking, equity is a better one.
Your hypotheticals and examples are very bad for someone who says elsewhere that
I’ll answer a better analogy : in a world where 80% of [insert any act of violence] is committed against women, should [insert any act of violence] against men still be prosecuted? Yes. Now, assuming a lawmaker believes that the harshness of punishments deters from crimes*, should that lawmaker make the punishment harsher for [insert any act of violence] committed against women? Also yes, that’s what’s happening here. That’s the definition of an aggravating circumstance such as a motive of hate: a reason for worsening the punishment. It’s still murder, only worse to account for the asymmetry.
*If you don’t assume that, then the reasons for punishing anything more or less are mostly symbolic anyways, so by making an asymmetric law you’re only acknowledging symbolically that there’s an asymmetrical problem, but it’s mostly just posturing.
I appreciate you sticking with your arguments; this is the first one in the whole thread that’s actually made sense to me. I’m not sure if it makes more sense as a goal to equalize the crimes between two groups than to lower the overall crime, but 1. It does still make sense and 2. Making the law symmetrical would draw less attention and probably result in less of a drop in net crime anyways, so… yeah, ok, I get your point now. Thanks.