Like all forms of gender-based violence against women, femicide is a problem that affects every country. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), intimate-partner violence is one of the most common forms of violence against women. It includes physical, sexual and emotional abuse and controlling behaviours by an intimate partner.
In 2016, the WHO stated the need for accurate and reliable statistics on violence against women as being fundamental to studying, researching and monitoring the phenomenon.
“Femicide is not a crime of passion, it is a crime of power,” wrote Elena Cecchettin after her sister was killed on November 2023. Italian student Giulia Cecchettin, 22, was killed, allegedly by her controlling ex-boyfriend, Filippo Turetta, a fellow student at a university in Padua.
Not being able to handle the break-up, Turetta lured Giulia into one last shopping trip together before killing her, prosecutors claim. Her body, with more than 20 stab wounds, was found at the bottom of a ditch. Cecchettin’s murder sparked protests in Italy against femicide and refocused public opinion on domestic violence.
In an attempt to address the high rates of femicide, on December 12, 2023, a new law – Aggravated Homicide – went into effect in Italy titled ‘Provisions for Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence’.
According to this law, “a person shall be punished with life imprisonment if the death, for example, involved sexual violence, or was committed by a stalker, against a relative, against an ascendant or a descendant, against a spouse, even if legally separated or divorced, or against a person with whom the offender was in a partnership, whether or not they were living together”. A similar law was promulgated in Malta in 2022.
Femicide is not a crime of passion, it is a crime of power- Eddie Attard
According to Diana Russell, who was a feminist activist, researcher and author of numerous books relating to violence against women, femicide is motivated by hatred, contempt, pleasure or a sense of ownership of women.
It is also said that, in femicide, men kill women for various reasons: reification, possession, jealousy and sexual desire and that femicide is an extreme expression of patriarchal power, a way to express sexual politics and the rituals of male dominance.
In Malta, the first femicide as a sense of ownership was that of Grazzja Grech, a prostitute who lived in a mezzanine in St Philip Street, Senglea. In the morning of April 13, 1832, Grech was not seen by her neighbours and her door remained closed till nearly noon.
Repeated knocks on the door were futile and, for this reason, someone decided to place a ladder against the wall to peer through the first-floor window. Grech was seen dead, nearly naked, soaked in blood in bed. Her neck had been slashed by a cutting instrument.
Grech had many clients and, at first, it seemed difficult for the police to find a suspect. Later, police inquiries established that on the evening of April 12, two youths were seen buying foodstuffs from a grocery shop in Senglea and later entering Grech’s residence.
From the description, other witnesses confirmed that the same youths had been frequenting Grech’s house for quite a long time. The youths were later identified as 18-year-old Giovanni Fedele from Sliema and 21-year-old Pawlu Laus from Valletta.
Fedele and Laus worked in the same silversmith shop and had been Grech’s clients for some months. The prostitute used to tell them that they were her favourite clients and they paid back this compliment by giving her a golden ring.
It was this ring that led to Grech’s murder as, some weeks later, she gave the ring to a fishmonger. When Fedele and Laus came to know about this, they became so furious with this ingratitude that they decided to kill the prostitute. According to them, “she” was theirs and theirs alone, even though they knew that she was a prostitute.
Fedele and Laus were charged with murder and, after a unanimous guilty verdict was read out, the court pronounced the death sentence on both. They were hanged at Floriana on May 21, 1832.