Students hold banners reading "Femincide is a state murder" and "We want us alive" as they perform a flash mob to protest against feminicide and violence against women, following 22-years-old Giulia Cecchettin's murder, outside University of Milan
Credit: Reuters File Photo
Rome: Giulia Cecchettin was just days away from graduating with a degree in biomedical engineering at the University of Padua, in Italy, when her disgruntled ex-boyfriend confronted her, demanding that she take him back. Her body was found a week later, wrapped in plastic bags and thrown in a ditch. She had been stabbed more than 70 times.
On Tuesday, more than a year after Cecchettin’s killing, her former boyfriend, Filippo Turetta, was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison, concluding a case that has outraged people across Italy, where chauvinistic attitudes remain deeply rooted at all levels of society.
In the first 11 months of this year, 101 women were killed in Italy, more than half by their current or former partners, according to Italy’s Interior Ministry. But Cecchettin’s story has stood out, striking a particularly deep chord across the country.
She was just 22 years old. Her life was about to take off. That it was cut short so brutally highlighted for many people the country’s failures to address the root problems of the pervasive violence.
Turetta, 22, confessed to the killing soon after he was arrested a year ago. When he took the stand in a court in Venice in October, he said he had been “upset” because Cecchettin broke up with him and refused to take him back.
“I was suffering a lot and I resented her,” he said. “I was angry because this made me suffer, and it upset me.”
Some three weeks after Cecchettin’s body was found, thousands congregated for her funeral. When the coffin was borne out of the church, mourners jingled their keys, heeding the call of her older sister, Elena Cecchettin, who had called on Italians to protest violence against women and “make noise” rather than hold a minute of silence to commemorate Giulia’s death.
Since Cecchettin’s death, her father, Gino Cecchettin, and Elena Cecchettin have campaigned ceaselessly against gender violence.
In order to help promote “a radical change” in the mindset of Italians, the family set up a foundation last month in Cecchettin’s name. Its goal is to promote better education in schools about domestic violence and to help women who have been victims of violence.
But the inauguration of the foundation was marked by controversy after Italy’s education minister, Giuseppe Valditara, sent a video in which he said that patriarchy no longer existed in Italy. He also blamed illegal immigration for violence against women. The video was met with nationwide backlash.
A few days later, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni dug in her heels and defended Valditara.
“There is certainly data that also speaks of a significant incidence of mass illegal immigration on this issue,” she said, and this “is one of the reasons Italy is working to stop mass illegal immigration.” She said that cultural reasons were also at play and that the government was committed to combating “a scourge.”
Elena Cecchettin responded on social media, saying that instead of spreading propaganda “at the presentation of the foundation named after a girl killed by a white, Italian, ‘decent boy,’” the authorities should instead listen to the Italian people. That way, “hundreds of women in our country would not continue to die every year,” she said.
After Tuesday’s ruling, Gino Cecchettin told reporters, “I think you don’t fight against gender violence with jail sentences, but with prevention.”
“My feeling is that we have lost, all of us, as a society,” he said, the news agency ANSA reported. Justice has been done, and should be respected, he said, but “as a human being I feel defeated.”