Sarah Rainsford
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
There are people here still searching for relatives who were in the Constellation bar on New Year's Eve.
The fire then was so fierce, causing such severe burns, that identifying everyone is difficult.
Those injured are being treated in hospitals across Switzerland and abroad.
The condition of many is described as critical.
The investigation into what caused this fire continues.
There is now a small shrine close to the scene with flowers and candles and notes written to the dead from a small community in deep shock.
So it was a bill that was designed to make femicide, so the murder of a woman for being a woman, so very gender-specific femicide.
murder, a standalone crime.
So whilst Italian law and international law has the crime of homicide, from the word for man, femicide is distinctly about the murder of a woman because of her gender, so motivated by her gender.
And this law has very specific parameters.
Essentially, it's about defining a very specific crime, which is murdering a woman and
as an act of control, as an act of domination, as an act of subjugation, and so specifically because she's a woman.
There's been quite a lot of discussion about the issue of gender violence in Italy for some time.
I have to say it's quite interesting.
I'm quite new to Italy.
And I noticed we have the TV on in the office and on the 24-hour news channel here, I kept seeing the word femicide on the screen.
And there was an awful lot in the headlines about the murder of women.
And I started to think that Italy was like an incredibly dangerous place to be as a female because it was so often so prevalent in the headlines.
But it comes from a discussion that's some years old, but I think really caught the national headlines a couple of years ago with one woman.
very high profile murder, which was the murder of a woman, a young student called Julia Cheketin, who was killed almost exactly two years ago by her ex-partner.