Abstract
Femicide is a wide-spread lethal form of violence against women. Despite its diffusion, to date, very few studies analyzed possible victims’ age differences in regard to fatal risk factors for femicide. To this aim, we carried out archive research on Italian femicide cases in the last decade, by comparing prior types of violence suffered and motives for femicide, which are considered crucial fatal risk factors for femicide, across adolescent/young (15–24 years), adults (25–64 years) and older women (65–93 years). From 2010 to 2019 we found 1207 female victims. Characteristics of victims, perpetrators, and their relationship were consistent with those found by international studies and underlined that the majority of femicides were perpetrated by an intimate partner. The results regarding fatal risk factors comparisons across age groups showed the existence of significant differences regarding both types of violence suffered prior to femicide and motives for femicide. The results are discussed in terms of policy implication and intervention.
Highlights
Gender-based violence is a multifaceted phenomenon and represents a serious violation of women’s fundamental rights and freedom [1]
Looking at the international literature on femicide we found that many studies focused on intimate partner homicide diffusion considering victims and/or perpetrators risk factors, and/or the contextual characteristic of the homicide [26,27,29,30], while other compared women-only victims of intimate partner violence (IPV) and victims of intimate partner homicide (IPH) in order to investigate fatal risk factors for femicide [31,32,33]
Analyzing femicides prevalence across years, we found that the highest number of female murders was recorded in 2013 (12.2%)
Summary
Gender-based violence is a multifaceted phenomenon and represents a serious violation of women’s fundamental rights and freedom [1]. It is estimated that 1 in 3 women (35.6%) has been a victim of violence at least once in her life, mostly by an intimate partner [3,4,5]. In Italy, 6 million and 788 thousand (31.5%) women between 16 and 70 years, reported suffering from physical or sexual violence during their life: of these, 26.4% suffer these abuses from their current partner and 46.1% from the ex-partner [6]. Of the 87,000 femicides reported worldwide in 2017, 34.4% were caused by an intimate partner, 24.0% by family members, and 42.0% by perpetrators outside the family (friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and unknown) [13]
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