It will run for one year, tasked with studying new solutions to the scourge of femicide that affects, in various forms, 35 per cent of women worldwide.
A commission of inquiry composed of twenty senators will spend one year studying the dimensions, conditions, nature and causes of femicide, so as to place parliament in a position to adopt, where appropriate, the most effective measures to curb the scourge of gender-based violence, which affects 35 per cent of women worldwide. The "parliamentary commission of inquiry on femicide, as well as on every form of gender-based violence" — as it is officially named — has been approved by the Senate and will, among other things, be required to monitor the concrete implementation of the Istanbul Convention of 2011, the first international instrument on the prevention and combating of violence against women and domestic violence. It also proposes to analyse cases of femicide that have occurred in Italy since 2011, in order to establish whether recurrent conditions or behaviours can be identified that are amenable to statistical assessment, with the aim of guiding preventive action.
At a more political level, the commission will also be required to assess the degree of attention and the capacity for intervention of the authorities and public administrations tasked with carrying out prevention activities and providing assistance to women victims of violence, and to verify that the resources allocated by the 2013 femicide law are effectively directed to the structures dealing with gender-based violence. In a year's time, in its final report, the commission will also be able to propose legislative and administrative solutions to improve the prevention and countering of femicide. The first data on femicide date back to the World Health Organisation's 2002 report, according to which the leading cause of death among women aged between 16 and 44 worldwide is homicide by known individuals, in particular by partners and former partners. The most recent report, that of 2013, establishes instead that 35 per cent of women worldwide experience some form of violence during their lifetime.
The term "femicide" was first used with this meaning by Diana Russell who, in 1992, in the book Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing, coined — through the use of this new criminological category — the term for the act of violence by a man against a woman "as a woman". In 2013 Italy equipped itself with a law introducing the specific offence of femicide, which encompasses a series of criminal acts of different kinds, from homicide to abuse, from stalking to physical injury. The term, however, rose to prominence in the wake of the film Bordertown, which recounts the events of Ciudad Juarez, a city on the border between Mexico and the United States, where since 1992 more than 4,500 young women have disappeared and more than 650 have been raped, tortured and then killed and abandoned on the edge of the desert.
