Stefania Noce, a feminist activist, was killed by her boyfriend on 27 December 2011. Her story and her struggles remain highly relevant today.
On 27 December 2011, Italy was confronted with yet another killing of a woman by her former boyfriend. The victim was Stefania Noce, a 24-year-old woman from Catania and a feminist activist. Her story could have ended up filed away in that endless list of women killed for being women — a list that is always spoken about far too little — yet nine years on she remains a symbol. This is partly because of who the victim was, far removed from the stereotypes typically used to frame this kind of murder, and partly because of how her death was defined during the trial: femicide, the first time the Italian judicial system came into contact with this term. It marked the beginning of a new era — the one we are still living through today — in which the news constantly reports new femicides, yet society finds itself in the midst of a process of growing awareness on the issue. Nine years after Stefania Noce's death, something has changed for the better in Italy in the fight against violence against women, but there is still a great deal to be done.
Stefania Noce was studying Arts and Philosophy at the University of Catania and was an activist. She was a member of the Catanian student movement, organised collections for people in need, campaigned for the rights of migrants and was at the forefront of the battle against gender discrimination. Stefania Noce was a feminist who carried her struggles into both the streets and university lecture halls, as well as into the press, through her contributions to several independent local media outlets. "No woman can be the property or hostage of a man, a state, or, least of all, a religion," she wrote in an article entitled "Does it still make sense to be feminists?".
On the morning of 27 December 2011, Stefania Noce lost her life at the hands of a man — her ex-boyfriend. Loris Gagliano, at the time a psychology student, had spent several years at her side until they broke up. After the relationship ended, Gagliano began committing acts of abuse against her: he followed her, frightened her, and had even tampered with the brakes of her car. Then, on that day at the end of December, he turned up at her family home, killing her, doing the same to her grandfather, who had intervened to defend her, and seriously injuring her grandmother.
The killer was sentenced to life imprisonment for those murders, and in the first-instance verdict — thanks to the work of the Noce family's consultant, Pina Ferraro — the word femicide appeared in an Italian court ruling for the first time. The term then disappeared from the second-instance verdict, with the prosecutor describing it as "an ugly neologism with a sociological flavour."
Stefania Noce is not a victim of male violence unlike any other. Yet she is a louder victim, because she forced the country to examine its conscience over the way violence against women had until then been reported. Femicide, as a legal concept, did not exist in Italy at the moment Loris Gagliano stabbed his ex-girlfriend repeatedly. It was treated instead as just another murder, one of those attributed to a "fit of madness" or "blind jealousy" — at least judging by the way the mainstream press had described what happened that 27 December, almost as though it were a mitigating factor.
The femicide law came after the first-instance verdict that associated Stefania Noce's death with this neologism. It was a historic moment — the first real affirmation in a courtroom that a distinction existed between causing the death of a person and causing the death of a woman as a woman, in the exercise of a form of subordination and male control over her. Stefania Noce was a victim of femicide like the thousands who had come before her, but for the first time she was recognised as such, tearing open a gap in the patriarchal wall behind which society had been hiding for decades.
But there is another reason why Stefania Noce has become a symbol: the paradox between her struggles and her death. A young woman who fought for women's rights, who battled against the subordination of women to male dominance, fell victim to all of this, killed by a former boyfriend who was unable to accept that he had lost control over her. An ending that demolished in one stroke the entire narrative that had until then been constructed around femicides, at a time when they did not yet legally exist as such. Victims were portrayed as weak figures, incapable of defending themselves or reporting abuse, almost complicit in a pattern of violence that it was only logical would eventually end badly. And yet the story of Stefania Noce shows how utterly wrong all of this was. Not even an activist in the field like her — an educated, aware young woman who understood the problems of being immersed up to her neck in a sexist environment — was able to save herself, a sign that the problem does not lie with the victims, but with the social context in which they become victims.
It has been nine years since Stefania Noce's death, and many steps forward have been taken in Italy on the issue of violence against women, while in other respects things continue to fall short. First, the figures: "The sources currently available are multiple, fragmented, inadequate and not even consistently defined. Administrative sources in the health, legal and social spheres are still not fit for purpose," Linda Laura Sabbadini, director of Istat, recently noted.
From the few available data, it is known that between 2006 and 2014 violence against women declined overall, but not in its most severe forms, such as rape and femicide. In 2020, according to partial data from Eures for November, 91 women were killed for being women, of whom 81 in a family context — a record figure in percentage terms compared with previous years. But in the absence of a consistent definition of femicide, it is possible that many murders of this kind were recorded as ordinary homicides. Women continue to be victims of violence perpetrated in the name of a superstructure rooted in patriarchy in Italy, and this despite the country having signed international conventions and introduced new provisions on the issue over the past decade.
The Istanbul Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence, ratified by Italy one year after the murder of Stefania Noce, is without doubt the first major step in this direction, as it led to national legislative work to bring the country into line with all the recommendations contained therein. In the autumn of 2013, just a few months after the word femicide made its first appearance in an Italian courtroom, the first Italian law on the subject was passed. It introduced new aggravating circumstances in cases of the murder of a woman, strengthened coercive measures against perpetrators and offered greater support to victims of violence. In 2015 came the Piano d'azione straordinario contro la violenza sessuale e di genere, adopted with the aim of establishing an integrated system for collecting and processing data on the subject. Then in 2019 came the codice rosso law, which increased penalties for sexual violence and stalking and introduced new categories of offence, such as revenge porn.
The national regulatory framework, driven by the international community, has thus undergone profound transformations for the better since that terrible 27 December nine years ago, when Loris Gagliano put an end to his ex-girlfriend's life. But the stark figures on gender-based violence and femicides in 2020, as well as the way in which they continue to be reported, tell us that there is still a great deal of work to be done. It is no coincidence that, just as we approach the tenth anniversary of the Istanbul Convention, the Council of Europe has examined its implementation in Italy and concluded that there is urgent need to adopt more effective protective measures. The battle that Stefania Noce waged for women's rights and against gender-based violence, although it has achieved some successes, is far from over.
