Femicide in Turin from 1970 till 2012

In the 1960s, gender concept and female role developed highlighting sexual inequalities in the relationship between male and female. In this perspective, there was a need to identify the violence perpetrated by men against women in order to gain awareness of the phenomenon. In 1990, Diana Russell coined the term “femicide” as a murder of a woman by a man because she is a woman. In this study, we analyze the features of murders involving male as authors and female as victims occurred in Turin from 1970 till 2012. Our goal is to determine whether the legislative and cultural changes that took place in Italy during that period had an impact on the rate of these crimes. Accordingly, we examined the archives of the Institute of Legal Medicine and those of the Central Morgue of Turin together with the stories reported in local newspapers to better understand the circumstances in which such crimes occurred. We focused upon the following items: the locations where crimes took place, the weapons used, the perpetrators’ features (including their motivations), the victims’ age and nationality. Then, we divided the crimes into femicides and homicides to compare the two categories. In our series, femicides were more frequent than homicides, and the frequency of violent deaths decreased over time. As regards to the victims’ age, there was a discrepancy within the two groups: most of the homicides took place against women over the age of 65 years; while femicides were concentrated in the range of 25-50 years old. Most of the killings occurred against Italian women. Over 60% of homicides had a woman as the sole victim; while in 8.84% of cases, the homicide was followed by the perpetrator’s suicide. Among femicides, 62.4% of cases concerned only one woman and 17.6% of them were followed by the perpetrator’s suicide. With regards to femicide, in 64% of cases the perpetrator was the partner, in 10.4% of cases a former partner, and in 6.4% of cases a close relative. Finally, in 9.6% of cases the perpetrator was a stalker. There was not a prevalence of a particular weapon and the injuries were mainly inflicted on the victims’ head. As regards to the place where the events occurred, there was a clear prevalence of the couple’s home, followed by the victim’s home. The analysis of the results shows that the introduction of divorce law (1970) did not alter the trend of “femicide”, which decrease only after the ban of mitigating circumstances for “honor killing” (1981).