The news in Italy this week has been dominated by two sexual violence scandals. In one, the son of the speaker of the senate, the street-fighting politician Ignazio La Russa, is under investigation for rape. In another, a 66-year-old school caretaker who, from behind, inserted his hands inside the underwear of a 17-year-old student from Rome, was absolved because the assault only lasted “between five and 10 seconds”.
Both cases have revealed that Italy is incapable of taking the subject seriously. After it emerged that a 22-year-old woman had denounced his son, La Russa stated that she had taken cocaine before going to Milan’s Apophis club in May. The newspaper Libero then revealed the alleged victim’s prescription drugs. The insinuation was that if she remembered nothing between being offered a drink in the club and waking up in La Russa’s bed (at which point she was informed she had also had sex with someone else), it was her own fault.
Such victim smearing is commonplace in rape trials: in 2017 a court in Ancona absolved two men of the rape of a 22-year-old Peruvian woman because they said (and the judges agreed) that she was “ugly”. In a famous case from 1999, a man was cleared of rape because the victim was wearing tight jeans believed to be impossible to remove without her assistance.
The school-caretaker story gained traction this week when many Italians began posting 10-second videos of themselves to demonstrate just how long that period can be. It made unsettling viewing but drove the point home: the protection of women in Italy is a very low priority. “Sorry to be vulgar,” said a quiet female friend of mine in Parma, “but why don’t we take a broom handle and shove it up the judge’s arse, just for 10 seconds, and see if he still thinks that’s not assault.”
The country is clearly decades behind the equality curve. Shortly after moving to Parma, I was amazed that the 2000 Miss Italia beauty pageant pulled in almost 12 million viewers. Trashy TV seemed to confirm that lechery was normalised: programmes invariably showed elderly men surrounded by bikini-clad young women who were given diminutive nicknames.
The late media mogul Silvio Berlusconi not only created that fleshpot broadcasting but also helped the country throw out its moral compass: his “bunga-bunga” orgies and incessant jokes about “whores” and “poofs” suggested that sexual and linguistic propriety could be ignored with impunity.
When I ask feminist friends if Italy is perhaps no worse than anywhere else, they tell me that it really really is. “Sexism here is systemic. We’ve gone backwards on all fronts,” says Cecilia, a friend from Turin. It’s not just incidental sexism, she says, but a power system that constantly denigrates women. “Institutional figures automatically say that any victim is a liar.”
In 2021 Beppe Grillo, the comic and founder of the Five Star Movement (the zany political party), released a furious two-minute video after his son was accused of participating in a group rape in 2019. (The trial is ongoing.) “It’s not true at all that there was a rape,” Grillo shouted at the camera, addressing investigators. “Someone who is raped in the morning and in the afternoon goes kitesurfing and only denounces the rape after eight days seems strange to you [because] it is strange.”
In the aftermath of the 2022 gathering of the Alpini, Italy’s widely admired mountain infantry, more than 170 women came forward to denounce aggressions, from catcalling to slaps, touchings and insults. Most Alpini are still in denial about the seriousness of the accusations. “It’s the fault of how they dress,” said one. “They’re provocative and then they play the victim,” said another.
The lack of regard for victims even occurs when politicians pretend to take their side. Last August, Giorgia Meloni, now prime minister, shared a hazy video of a Ukrainian woman being sexually assaulted in Piacenza to make the point that the alleged perpetrator was an asylum seeker. Rape is always the emotive, go-to subject when far-right parties want to stir up a moral panic around migrants.
But when the accused is “one of us”, it’s a completely different narrative. Journalists from Rai News 24 (the state broadcaster’s channel) were appalled to discover this week that their piece had been deliberately doctored to downplay the seriousness of the accusations against La Russa’s son. It was so watered down that one journalist withdrew her byline from the report.
Giulia Blasi, co-creator of Italy’s #MeToo equivalent, #QuellaVoltaChe (“that time that …”), and author of The Manual for Revolutionary Girls, believes that part of the problem is the inability of second-wave feminists to pass the baton on to the next generation. “Our mothers did an amazing amount of work, fighting to legalise abortion and divorce [in 1978 and 1970 respectively], but then they became so bourgeois and settled down. For 20 years, in the 90s and early 00s, there was no feminism around me,” she said.
Now, when many new organisations are fighting for women’s rights, the movement is divided and often pursuing unpopular, niche causes.
“There’s a deep fracture between second and third wavers,” says Blasi, with the former struggling to accept elements of intersectionality (the interconnectedness of discriminations) and gender identity. There has also been a backlash against inclusive language (the idea of degendering Italian nouns and adjectives by using the schwa symbol).
Superficially it might seem that Italy has made important progress on equality: the country now has not only a female prime minister but also a female leader of the opposition, Elly Schlein. News programmes frequently lead with stories about femicide, which suggests that the violence is at least part of mainstream discourse. But optimism is repeatedly shaken. In another sentence last week, a 43-year-old man wasn’t given the life term requested by prosecutors because Carol Maltesi, the 26-year-old woman he murdered, was perceived by the judge to be “disinhibited”.
“Women can always be blamed for the violence they endure,” says Blasi.
It might take many years to unpick what she calls “this latticework of self-justification that men use”.
• Tobias Jones is an award-winning writer, investigative journalist and commentator on Italian affairs. His book The Po: An Elegy for Italy’s Longest River has just been published in paperback (Apollo).
