Violence against Women and Femicide: an analysis on the murders of foreign women in Italy

This paper presents the results of a research on the representations of femicide in the judicial field, in Italy. The use of the term femicide is analysed through the lens of the normative process, examining its social meanings and questioning its political and economic anchoring using the “juridical field” model (Bourdieu 1986). The essay is based on a wide theoretical framework. It starts by highlighting the problems evoked by the term ‘femicide’ (Corradi, et al. 2016; Radford and Russell 1992); its declension in criminal law and jurisprudence through its coding in specific types of offence (Merli 2015). The topics of power and imbalance between the sexes (Goffman 1977) are analysed by presenting their juridical definitions and those found in penal codes (Casanova 2016; Cavina 2011; Feci and Schettini 2017). This perspective helps framing considerations about the results of the empirical research based on quantitative data taken from 93 verdicts of ‘femicide’ sentences which involved foreign or migrant victims (chosen from a corpus of 370 issued in Italy between 2010 and 2016) and qualitative aspects: gathered through expert interviews and the tales of violence against women in a verdicts’ judgemental sample of murders of foreign women. The study confirms the way in which narrations produced in the “judicial field” – despite the “distortions” affecting them (Dubé 2012; Gusfield 1968) – prove to be rich sources for the knowledge of a phenomenon which, still today, suffers from a structural lack of data.