Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has claimed that illegal immigrants are responsible for higher incidences of rape in Italy and that police presence in cities must be upped to make public spaces safer.
Speaking in a wide-ranging interview with Italian women’s magazine Donna Moderna yesterday – the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women – Meloni acknowledged she would be labelled a racist for delivering the message so bluntly.
The Italian Premier said that combatting mass illegal immigration would help contribute to efforts to make public spaces safer for women.
‘Now I will be called a racist, but there is a greater incidence, unfortunately, in cases of sexual violence, by immigrants’, particularly by those ‘who arrived illegally,’ Meloni said.
‘Clearly, when you have nothing, a ”degeneration” occurs that can lead anywhere’, she added, before going on to say that the legal system must seek to properly punish those who commit gender-based violence.
‘We need to guarantee the presence of the police, guarantee that there are crimes, guarantee that when someone commits a crime they pay for that crime,’ she concluded.
But Riccardo Magi, leader of Italy’s ‘More Europe’ party, has chastised Meloni’s government for claiming the nation is seeing a rise in sexual violence due to illegal immigration as he declared the Interior Ministry’s own figures suggested the overwhelming majority of rapes and femicide are committed by Italian citizens.
The row over gender-based violence is a hot topic in Italy at present.
Last week, a foundation was launched in memory of Giulia Cecchetin, a 22-year-old Italian woman who was kidnapped and brutally murdered by her ex-boyfriend last year.
At the memorial foundation’s opening, Italian Education Minister Giuseppe Valditara released a video in which he made a claim similar to Meloni’s yesterday, prompting a major backlash.
‘We must not overlook the fact that the rise in incidents of sexual violence is somehow linked to forms of marginalisation and perversion stemming from illegal immigration,’ Valditara said.
More Europe leader Magi quickly bit back, sharing a social media post that accused Valditara of spreading ‘fake news’.
‘(The education minister’s) statement is contradicted by all statistics, the data released by the Ministry of the Interior speak clearly: over 80% of femicides in Italy are committed by Italian citizens.
‘Valditara should be ashamed: his is just a shameless racist exploitation,’ he concluded.
According to a report by Euronews citing figures from Italy’s national statistics agency (ISTAT), the country saw 334 murders in 2023, up 3.7% from the year before.
Around 94% of the Italian women killed that year were victims of fellow Italians, according to the agency.
Though femicide and rape are two different crimes, ISTAT’s figures also acknowledged that most reported cases of rape in Italy in 2023 were committed by people known to the victim.
The perpetrator was a partner in 62.7% of reported cases, with friends or relatives of the victim accounting for another 13%.
Meanwhile, only 4.4% of women who said they were raped by an Italian filed a complaint about the incident, compared to 24.7% of those claiming the perpetrator was foreign, ISTAT revealed.
This past weekend saw tens of thousands of people march in Rome on the eve of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women to protest gender-based violence, which in Italy so far this year has claimed the lives of 99 women, according to a report last week by the Eures think tank.
Similar protests erupted in countries around the world as well as in France which is currently witnessing one of the most heinous rape and sexual abuse trials in its history.
Prosecutors yesterday said 71-year-old Dominique Pelicot, a self-confessed rapist who allowed scores of men to rape his wife after drugging her over a decade, should spend the rest of his life in a cell.
Speaking at the Vaucluse Criminal Court, in Avignon, Attorney General Laure Chabaud said: ‘The maximum sentence is 20 years of criminal imprisonment, which is both a lot and too little in view of the seriousness of the repeated attacks.’
Ms Chabaud said Dominque’s wife Gisele Pelicot, a mother of three, had been reduced to an ‘object’ by men who just ‘used her for easy sex’ over almost a decade.
Her ex-husband contacted them all online, and then invited them back to the family home in Mazan, near Avignon, where they raped his drugged wife.
‘Gisele Pelicot’s state, close to a coma, should have raised the alarm,’ said Ms Chabaud.
‘Rape is characterised by a lack of consent,’ she added, saying there was no possibility that the victim had voluntarily taken drugs to put her to sleep, as part of a ‘libertine game’, as the defence has suggested.
‘What pleasure can she sincerely get from it, without counting the side effects the next day?’ said Ms Chabaud.
Ms Pelicot suffered significant health issues including several sexually transmitted diseases as a result of the abuse.
Jean-François Mayet, the second attorney general at the case, said ‘20,000 photos and videos’ were found in a catalogue of the abuse on Mr Pelicot’s devices.
Almost all of them showed an unconscious Ms Pelicot being subjected to horrific acts.
Both the Pelicots gave final statements in court, with the trial expected to conclude next month.