The recent feminicides of Giulia and Vanessa have understandably exacerbated the already widespread outrage over these heinous crimes and violence against women in general, creating a climate of suspicion and fear in the female population regarding an alleged feminicidal potential hidden in every male, a kind of pandemic alarm launched by the media, which, for obvious reasons, selectively report the news with the strongest emotional impact.
Yet, the Ministry of the Interior's report on voluntary homicides in Italy in 2023 surprisingly indicates that femicide is decreasing:
"As of today's date, relative to the period January 1-December 31, 2023, 330 homicides have been recorded, with 120 female victims, of whom 97 were killed in a family/affectionate environment; of these, 64 found death at the hands of their partner/ex-partner. Analyzing the homicides committed in 2023 compared to those that occurred in the previous year, there is an increase in the general trend of events, from 325 to 330 (+2%), while the number of female victims decreases, from 128 to 120 (-6%). As for the general trend in crimes committed in the family/affective sphere, there is an increase in the number of events, from 144 to 146 (+1%); however, there is a decrease in the number of female victims, from 104 to 97 (-7%). Compared to 2022, the number of homicides committed by the partner or ex-partner is unchanged (69 cases), while there is an increase in the number of female victims, from 61 to 64 (+5%). Finally, in the period from December 27 to December 31, 2023, 4 homicides result, all with male victims."
Taking the annual data from the Ministry of the Interior, which anyone can consult online, I have therefore prepared the table below relating only to the last 8 years, for the sake of brevity, but still sufficiently explanatory:
| Year | Men killed | Women killed | Women killed by partner or ex partner |
| 2016 | 251 | 149 | 76 |
| 2017 | 234 | 123 | 54 |
| 2018 | 212 | 133 | 73 |
| 2019 | 204 | 111 | 68 |
| 2020 | 170 | 116 | 67 |
| 2021 | 186 | 122 | 70 |
| 2022 | 197 | 128 | 61 |
| 2023 | 210 | 120 | 64 |
Let me immediately clarify that in this article I consider all voluntary murders of women to be feminicides and all voluntary murders of men to be mascicides; this is because the number of voluntary murders unrelated to gender is irrelevant to both men and women (killing a hostage, elimination of an inconvenient witness, revenge between families, disputed inheritance, are causes of murder regardless of gender but have little impact on the total number of murders). Today, those who want to create division and resentment between males and females, insinuate that women are killed because they are women, and that is because of hatred, contempt, punishment and prevarication of men over women, in a word: because of patriarchy. This is not true, it is demagogic, because women today are mostly killed by desperate men within sick, dying or dead relationships, men who then, in a good percentage, commit suicide. Women today are simply killed because there are murderous men around who nonetheless kill far more men than women, albeit with different motives: women are killed predominantly within their traditional, typically female domains, namely family, affections and relationships; men are killed within different, typically male domains: competition, defiance, quarrel, war, robbery. Different causes for different genders, then, but equally abject causes for murders of equal severity that deserve equal media prominence and equal general outrage.
To premise again that, to kill both men and women (and much more men), are almost always men; both feminicides and mascicides therefore, are committed almost exclusively by men. We should therefore not tendentiously focus only on the causes of femicide but rather on why there are still male killers (and such killers, I repeat, kill more men than women, in the 3:2 ratio)
In general, there are many beliefs and clichés to correct, myths to debunk, and demagoguery to debunk with scientific and statistical data, for example:
There is no ongoing epidemic of feminicide but, on the contrary, feminicide in 2023 (120) decreased both compared to 2022 (128) and to the average of the previous 7 years (average 126)..
Even in 2016 there were 149 feminicides; 123 in 2017; 133 in 2018; 122 in 2021; and 128 in 2022. Only in 2019 (111) and 2020 (116) were there fewer. Among feminicides then, those committed by the partner or ex-partner were slightly higher in 2023 (64) than in 2022 (61) but decreased compared to the average of the previous 7 years (average 67); and not only that: they were more in 2016 (76), 2018 (73), 2019 (68), 2021 (70), and equal in 2020 (67). They were fewer only in 2017 (54) and 2022 (61). (Data provided by ISTAT and the Ministry of the Interior)
For quite some time now, and since the murder of Giulia Cecchettin in particular, the "news" media have been competing to distort reality by giving prominence only to the murders of women and reserving for those of men only tiny paragraphs, thus creating the false perception of an ongoing feminicide emergency, as if we had entered the season of woman-hunting by the prevaricating and murderous male. Again, without detracting from the seriousness of each individual feminicide, the likelihood of a woman being killed by the man with whom she has or has had a love affair remains extremely low: in the last 8 years an average of 67 women a year have been killed by their partner or ex-partner in Italy out of a female population of 26 million (ages 15 to 90).
Men are killed far more often than women, they are no longer to blame, and their deaths are not worth less.
In fact, if we look at the data on murders in general, we see that men are killed much more than women; until the early 1990s we were even at very high values, like 5:1, because organized crime was killing much more and of course it was killing almost only men: how many innocent males were killed by subversive political organizations and the Mafia! Considering only our last 8 years, males have been killed on average 1.66 times more than women (for every 2 women, about 3 men are killed, 3.2 to be precise); and consider that during the Covid pandemic the murders of males dropped a lot, as the activities had stopped, otherwise the ratio would be even higher.
Women are killed predominantly in the relational, family or emotional sphere by co-workers, acquaintances, friends, relatives, partners or former partners, husbands or ex-husbands thus with many warning signs that, if heeded, can avert tragedy; the male perpetrator is also almost always identified and, in about 20 percent of cases, after committing the murder, commits suicide (the fact that the murderer commits suicide or is imprisoned does not detract from the seriousness and irreparability of the act, however, it is indicative of the level of suffering that precedes, accompanies and follows a murder of passion, even on the part of the perpetrator).
Men, on the other hand, are mostly killed abruptly, unpredictably, inevitably, without any premonitory signs and by killers who do not commit suicide; rather, they vanish and often go unpunished; such murders occur as a result of quarrels, personal grudges, robberies and economic motives, fights, and futile motives (such as appreciation to a woman, a trivial driving quarrel or denying a cigarette). Again, if a war breaks out it has always been the males who leave and die while the women continue their lives at home.
Given the outrage that arises when a woman is murdered and the indifference or near indifference that accompanies the murder of a man, the question immediately arises: is a murdered man worth less than a murdered woman? I think not because a dad who is killed over a trivial quarrel in a car is not worth less than a woman and is no longer at fault; a 20-year-old who is beaten to death by the pack outside a nightclub is not worth less than a woman and is no longer at fault; a young father who goes off and dies in a senseless war is not worth less than a woman and is no longer at fault.
In fact, the killing of a woman by a man has always outraged the public more than the killing of a man because the woman is physically weaker, defenseless, and there is therefore something inherently vile and despicable about femicide. Currently, however, feminicide is being instrumentalized for ideological purposes by more or less sincere progressives pushing for the creation of a single hybrid gender, by feminists, and by a vote-seeking left that fawns over minorities including the LGBTQIA+ community.
Today the woman has all the tools to defend herself from her abusive partner and knows how to humiliate and abuse psychologically as well as and more than the man.
Speaking of mistreatment, it must be said that the woman physically mistreated by her partner now has everyone on her side and can abundantly defend herself both legally and economically by being usually self-employed. Yes, there is also psychological mistreatment, but beware: the woman is as good as or better than the man at psychological mistreatment and with an extra weapon: a separated man, in Italy, is usually left homeless, penniless and childless, and all by a judge's decision; is this not an extreme form of legalized mistreatment?
Male mistreatment today has little to do with patriarchy; instead, it is a consequence of desperation and a sign of a crisis in the man-woman relationship.
For every battered woman, there is an unhappy man: the battering man today is not an authoritarian patriarch who decides the fate and tasks of the women of the house but a desperate man, usually of low socio-cultural status, who tries to fix the relationship with the woman by raising his hands.
The breaking down of gender differences has exacerbated man-woman conflict..
Today in Europe and America there is an attempt to reset gender differences between men and women to zero (hopefully leaving the anatomical ones behind), and in this context there are sacred words in the West such as "Gender Equality" and "Equal Opportunity": unfortunately, however, it has been noted that in Northern European countries, for example, where considerable gender equality has been achieved, the rates of violence against women are higher than in other European countries where there is greater preservation of traditional roles of men and women (a phenomenon that has been named the "Nordic Paradox")[1]</a. Why?
This is probably because the division of roles, tasks, and behaviors between men and women, based on the undeniable physical, hormonal, and psychological differences, has so far allowed for a synergistic coexistence and cooperation between the two sexes, a balance that is broken if a single hybrid gender is to be created. That is, it is intuitive that if a woman comes home at night having done the same work as a man, with the same level of stress, frustration, and (almost) testosterone, violent and angry confrontation is more likely. In Nature's plans, the division of roles on the basis of the different aptitudes of male and female also serves to avoid conflict, and a woman with the traditional feminine gifts of surrender, patience, and acceptance is not a frustrated, submissive, and humiliated woman, far from it: she is a woman who is happy to be different from the man, who does not set the same goals as the male because she is proud of her own (I understand, the talk of Nature's plans and laws makes one very angry to those who do not know biology and have fanciful creative plans for the future of humanity).
In the history of mankind, the relationship between man and woman has always been a synergy, a collaboration, and not a relationship between perpetrator and victim as one would like to imply today, and proof of this is that women have always had and have an even longer average life span than men; and can anyone say that man is happier than woman?
If a perfect balance of forces between man and woman had not been achieved, if indeed man were a prevaricating executioner always victorious over woman, biology teaches us that the female gender would have become extinct by now (and with it the human species) while instead it is alive, long-lived and healthy.
So I agree with the cultural and sentimental re-education of some males who are bullies to women; but the re-education of women to womanhood is also necessary, other than teaching them how to ape the male in order to succeed in life! Let each of the two holy sexes regain their own territory and live in peace. Long live the differences then, the only way to improve mutual respect.
NOTE:
[1] Gracia, E., Merlo J. 2016. Intimate partner violence against women and the Nordic paradox. Social Science & Medicine 157 27-30
Medico psicoterapeuta di formazione cognitivo-comportamentale, oltre che di psicofarmacologia (Tranquillanti: come liberarsene, 2017, e Farmaci antidepressivi: effetti collaterali,2020) si interessa dell’insorgenza dei disagi psico-emotivi tra cause mediche, sociali, ambientali e di stile di vita. Sull’argomento ha scritto nel 2015 il libro Quarant’anni di riflessioni. Il suo sito è www.angelomercuri.it
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Non ho mai letto così tante stupidaggini in vita mia! L’autore dell’articolo si è dimenticato di scrivere che la maggior parte degli omicidi sia verso donne che verso uomo viene commesso in stragrande maggioranza sempre da UOMINI!!! Sono gli uomini che uccidono, oltre ad essere più violenti per natura (non da sottovalutare il testosterone che rende il maschio più aggressivo). Secondo l’Istat la maggior parte degli omicidi, commessi da ex partner, compagni, parenti, riguardano le donne. Una percentuale ridicola riguarda gli uomini. I dati sono chiari!!! Cosa c’entrano gli omicidi totali di qualunque genere (visto che sono poi sempre commessi da maschi nella maggior parte dei casi) se si parla di femminicidio! E nella storia le donne sono state sempre sottomesse dall’uomo! Ma questo signore non ha studiato che le donne non avevano neanche il diritto di voto, non sa che non le si faceva neanche studiare?! Ma quale cooperazione! Ma la storia??! Secoli e secoli di soprusi e viene a raccontare tutte queste sciocchezze?! E magari il patriarcato non è mai esistito… mi mancherebbe solo di sentire questa!
Signora Anna Maria, nell’articolo è riportato “Da premettere ancora che, ad uccidere sia uomini che donne (e molto di più uomini), sono quasi sempre gli uomini; sia i femminicidi che i maschicidi dunque, sono commessi quasi esclusivamente da uomini. Non dovremmo pertanto concentrarci tendenziosamente solo sulle cause di femminicidio ma piuttosto sul perché esistono ancora uomini assassini (e tali assassini, lo ripeto, uccidono più uomini che donne, nel rapporto 3:2)”.
Inoltre, come si spera, il dialogo uomo-donna dovrebbe nutrirsi di aperture verso il tema e comprensione verso il fatto che la vita di una donna vale quanto quella di un uomo, e ciò a prescindere dal carnefice (empiricamente UOMO). La narrativa che deriverei da quanto scrive è quella di una Donna che è interessata esclusivamente al tema “donne morte”, disinteressandosi di uomini morti solo perché morti per mano del proprio genere, e – aggiungerei – anche di uomini uccisi da donne (solo perché in numero molto inferiore).
Dunque, a questo punto, Le chiederei: qual è la differenza tra Lei e un uomo disinteressato al femminicidio?
Ulteriormente, quanto da lei aggiunto è totalmente fuori dal tema, ossia, è sacrosanto che storicamente la misoginia ha avuto livelli orribili che, tra l’altro (da uomo) spero continuino a ridursi fino a rasentare lo 0. Vorrei però aggiungere che il DIALOGO uomo-donna dovrebbe avere dei toni adeguati e capaci di sensibilizzare entrambi verso una tematica fondamentale quale la “morte per mano di”, e non avere un tono accusatorio che rischia di alienare la parte opposta (e, ancora, rischia di confermare che la violenza verbale sia un fenomeno prevalentemente “donna”).
Io in primis riconosco che la società debba depurarsi dai resti di un’educazione patriarcale che, tuttavia, è impartita sia agli uomini che alle donne. Questo tipo di educazione può influenzare entrambi i sessi in modi differenti, perpetuando ruoli e comportamenti che contribuiscono alla violenza di genere. Per esempio, agli uomini viene spesso insegnato a reprimere le emozioni e a risolvere i conflitti con l’aggressività, mentre alle donne viene talvolta insegnato a essere sottomesse o a giustificare la violenza subita. Sarebbe cruciale superare questi stereotipi per entrambi i generi.
I soprusi che le donne hanno subito e che, in parte, subiscono ancora sono uno dei mali che questa società deve debellare, ma, come doveva esserle chiaro, l’articolo vuole dare un metro di paragone del fenomeno femminicidi e rendere chiaro che, seppur purtroppo esistente, il fenomeno è talvolta enfatizzato dai mass media e dalle testate giornalistiche. Queste tendenze mediatiche possono creare titoli sensazionalistici per attirare clic e, conseguentemente, introiti per le proprie testate. Tuttavia, questo non diminuisce la gravità del problema del femminicidio, ma evidenzia la necessità di un’informazione equilibrata e accurata per comprendere appieno la portata del fenomeno.
In conclusione, la speranza è quella di lavorare insieme per affrontare questo grave problema sociale con empatia e razionalità, piuttosto che con rabbia e accuse. Solo così si potrebbe sperare di ridurre la violenza e promuovere una società più giusta e sicura per tutti.