A new offence, an old political reflex
Italy has adopted a reform transforming femicide into a distinct offence in the penal code, with life imprisonment as the maximum penalty. On paper, it reads like a bold response to a social crisis. In reality, I see an old political reflex: when confronted with a deeply entrenched societal problem, legislators reach for the harshest sanction available and hope that expressive punishment will suffice.
This approach assumes that increasing the severity of sanctions will meaningfully deter violence. Yet, as we have know from Beccaria’s times, but recent decades of research have confirmed: severity plays a minimal role, while the certainty and swiftness of intervention matter far more (Nagin, 2013).
Femicide as the end stage of escalating, gender violence
Femicide is not a sentencing problem. It is the fatal end point of a long, often identifiable process of coercive control, escalation, and institutional failure.
Femicide is not a sentencing problem. It is the fatal end point of a long, often identifiable process of coercive control, escalation, and institutional failure. One of the most robust multisite case-control studies in the field demonstrates that intimate-partner femicides almost never occur without prior indicators: threats to kill, stalking, forced sex, separation, escalating violence, and failures to intervene (Campbell et al., 2003).
These patterns have been extensively documented in research on coercive control. Intimate-partner femicide grows out of a dynamic of domination and entitlement rather than spontaneous rage. Studies show how offenders use threats, surveillance, isolation and emotional control long before the homicide occurs (Johnson, Eriksson, Mazerolle & Wortley, 2019).
A complementary typology identifies an eight-stage trajectory leading to homicide, emphasising the missed institutional opportunities at every stage (Monckton Smith, 2020).
Comparative research on offenders’ social environments further indicates that femicide perpetrators are often embedded in networks that normalise or overlook escalating control, rather than challenge it at earlier stages (FarrHenderson, Di Marco & Evans, 2025).
Introducing a higher maximum sentence does not change any of this.
The Italian context: Gender norms as fertile ground for violence
To understand why this reform will likely have very limited effect, we should look beyond sentencing and into the social order in which femicides occur. Italy remains a society structured by strong gender norms and unequal distributions of care work, economic power, and social expectations. Research demonstrates that attitudes minimising violence against women and blaming victims are significantly more prevalent in societies with less gender equality (Sardinha, L., & Catalán, H. (2018); Gracia, 2014).
Moreover, countries with more traditional gender norms exhibit higher tolerance for violence and stronger tendencies to justify men’s controlling behaviour(Ivert, Gracia, Lila et al., 2018).
Violence grows out of a gendered social script in which male entitlement, control, and emotional volatility are normalised.
These findings echo what I and other speakers emphasised at yesterday’s national conference on violence against women: violence grows out of a gendered social script in which male entitlement, control, and emotional volatility are normalised. Without changing this script, the criminal code can only clean up its consequences, not prevent them.
Why life imprisonment does not prevent violence
Harsh penalties are politically attractive because they portray the act of caring about an issue, while demanding so little of the system. One does not need coordinated services, consistent protection orders, trained police, functioning risk-assessment protocols, or sufficient shelters. One does not need to confront social norms, nor to support women’s economic independence. One simply amends the penal code.
But sentencing is the final act in a tragedy whose earlier scenes were often full of warning signs. By the time life imprisonment is imposed, the homicide has already occurred, and the sequence of failures at the interpersonal, institutional and societal levels has long passed the point where sentencing can intervene.
The logic is straightforward: people committing intimate-partner violence are not weighing maximum penalties; they are acting within emotional, relational, and coercive dynamics that overwhelm rational calculation.
Symbolism without structure
Recognising femicide as a distinct offence is not without meaning. It names a gendered pattern of killing and signals societal condemnation, all of which can, however, be achieved in different ways. But symbolism without institutional reform is thin protection or no protection at all. The true engines of prevention: early detection of coercive control, enforceable protective measures, police training, risk assessment, economic autonomy, and sustained work on gender norms, cannot be replaced by a single sentencing provision.
Italy’s new law gestures toward the seriousness of the problem while steering clear of its causes. It expresses outrage but evades responsibility. This tension was on full display yesterday, on 25 November, when the Camera (lower house of the Italian parliament) approved the new femicide offence on the very day dedicated to ending violence against women, while the Senato (upper house of the Italian parliament) simultaneously derailed the parallel reform that would finally anchor sexual violence in the principle of free and affirmative consent. The contrast is striking: a law introducing life imprisonment advanced smoothly and unanimously, whereas the bill clarifying that sex without free and present consent is rape was sent back for “further inquiry”, effectively removing it from the Senato agenda despite previously having unanimous support.
This political choreography reveals an uncomfortable truth: expressing outrage through harsher punishment is far easier than committing to structural change. And until political attention shifts from punishment to prevention, femicides will continue to be treated as isolated tragedies rather than the predictable outcomes of a gender order that still grants men too much power, too much entitlement, and too much room to harm.
And until political attention shifts from punishment to prevention, femicides will continue to be treated as isolated tragedies.
And until political attention shifts from punishment to prevention, femicides will continue to be treated as isolated tragedies rather than the predictable outcomes of a gender order that continues to privilege control, override autonomy, and normalise unequal power both in intimate relationships and in society more broadly.
Conclusion
Sentencing can express condemnation, but it cannot carry the weight of prevention. A life sentence speaks loudly, but it does not reach the moments in which a woman decides whether she feels safe enough to leave, whether the police will believe her, whether the courts will protect her, whether the community will support her, or whether the man who controls her will stop.
Until reforms address those moments, or rather, until the architecture of prevention is given more attention than the architecture of punishment, Italy’s femicide law will remain what it is (and if we are a bit mean, what it is probably meant to be?): a powerful symbol, and a weak response.
