“Sluts”…Beware Italian Law
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Dumb Things Said By Smart People, The WorldI know the title seems to overstate the situation, but it doesn’t. Seriously.
This recent ruling certainly seems like you can’t be sexually liberated in Italy and expect protection from the police and the government.
From CNN:
Sexually abusing a teenager is less serious a crime if the girl is not a virgin, Italy’s higher court said on Friday in a controversial ruling that immediately drew a barrage of criticism.The court ruled in favor of a man in his forties, identified only as Marco T., who forced his 14-year old stepdaughter to have oral sex with him after she refused intercourse.
The man, who has been sentenced to three years and four months in jail, lodged an appeal arguing that the fact that his stepdaughter had had sex with men before should have been taken into consideration during his trial as a mitigating factor.
The supreme court agreed, saying that because of her previous sexual experiences, the victim’s “personality, from a sexual point of view, is much more developed than what would be normally expected of a girl of her age”.
“It is therefore fair to argue that (the damage for the victim) would be lower” if the abused girl was not a virgin, Italian news agencies quoted the court as saying.
This means the man could now be handed a lighter sentence.
One certainly can imagine what women are thinking in Italy right now. Sure, if you like to sleep around, one must expect a certain degree of danger in that lifestyle choice, but being raped and not protected isn’t one of them. This decision is certainly a disgrace to the country and its credibility.
Jeezus…
And yet, we seem to be crying foul too late. Just look at these recent rulings from Italy’s Supreme Court:
The supreme court is no stranger to controversial judgments.In recent years it has ruled that “an isolated and impulsive” pat on a woman’s buttocks at work did not constitute sexual harassment, and returned a verdict that a woman could not have been raped because she was wearing skin-tight jeans.
Regardless of cultural differences…these decisions are dangerous, sexist and wrong.
Let’s hope they get struck down as soon as possible.
This entry was posted on Sunday, February 19th, 2006 and is filed under Dumb Things Said By Smart People, The World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
February 19th, 2006 at 8:17 am
We have situations in this country where the punishment for parents who sexually or physical abuse their own child are not as harsh as the punishment a complete stranger would receive.
This is especially true if the parent is one of two things:
Deemed “respectible”- well off white collar professional, who got the right connections and rich enough to keep the story out of the papers.
And its especially true if the parents are extremely poor: because the underclass adults in American society don’t matter and their children matter even less.
We don’t have to look across the water for hypocricy when it comes to the sexual abuse of children.
Remember that female who got her johns by hitch-hicking and killed them? She was put to death. She was sexually abused all her childhood by family but nobody gave a damn, she was white trash. Turns out plently of people were aware; her teachers, even her own mother. Nobody seems to wonder how society ignored her situation (is it her fault she’s born poor?) until she became a monster we where forced to deal with after she started killing people. She wasn’t a sympathetic figure: A hard women who’d lived a hard life who hated men, and a lair to boot.
Let’s hope Italy deals with that error but how about we focus on the needs of our children right here?
March 13th, 2006 at 4:36 am
Hey!
I’m in Italy all the time. I can tell you.
THERE ARE NO VIRGINS LEFT THERE EXCEPT IN THE MATERNITY WARD!