Feminist Law Professors

Last October 17th in Italy, the Court of Appeals of Rome issued a sentence declaring that the rape of a sex worker is less punishable than the rape of a woman that does not choose to be a prostitute. The day after, October 18th, the Juvenile Court of Rome decided to suspend the trial of eight Italian boys who raped a young girl of 14. These two sentences, although not final at the time of this writing, constitute yet another step backwards in the recognition and strengthening of constitutional and legal rights of women in Italy.

Rape of Prosperina

Let’s examine the first case. On November 2008, an Italian man of 31 years old kidnapped, robbed and raped a Romanian prostitute. On March 2009, the man was charged with kidnapping, sexual violence and robbery, and was condemned to seven years imprisonment. Nevertheless the most recent sentence by the Court of Appeals of Rome on October 18th reduced his jail time from seven to three years and four months.

The main idea behind this decision was that sex workers by choosing to “work on the street,renounce their physical and moral integrity.” The physical, moral and legal offences to a prostitute cannot be considered equal to that of woman who is “not a prostitute” and, therefore, the crime in question should be judged in light of these attenuating circumstances.

It is clear from this perspective adopted by the Court that women must conform to the attitudes/behaviours that are morally accepted by society. Failing to do so, they run the risk of being punished (by being raped).   This means that men can feel empowered to violate women’s autonomy and not respect the rights of sex-workers because sex workers have neither social nor legal legitimacy.   This sentence, thus, implies different punishments for two kinds of rape. There are rapes of “series A” which have to be strongly punished, and then there are those of “series B” which require less punishment because the victim’s moral transgression or behavior encourages sexual violence.

Rape of the Sabine Women

The “series B” category could also be applied to the case of the young girl raped by eight boys in August 2007, in Castro Montalto – a small town close to Viterbo (Rome).   The eight boys, all juveniles at the time, met a 15 year old girl at a party, led her out into the woods, and gang raped her.   A few days later, the girl reported the crime and the boys were identified.   To great public outcry, the mayor of Montalto di Castro provided 20,000 euro to cover legal costs for six of the eight boys -indeed one of the boys seemed to be his nephew.     As mentioned at the beginning of this article, last October 18th the Juvenile Court of Rome settled to suspend the trial, deciding to “put the boys under observation” for 24 months. The young men (two of which are now 18 years old) will have to follow a program of support and control and at the end of this period must demonstrate sincere penitence and apologize to the victim and her family for their deed.   If they pass this test, the court will strike the crime from their record.

Rape of the Sabine Women[/caption]Not only have feminist groups raised their voices in protest, but the public at large has also expressed its indignation over this sentence, whose passing so clearly demonstrates how little traction feminist politics are getting in Italy.   In fact the decision of the Court of Rome shows, for the umpteenth time, an institutional failure to adequately address the issue of violence against women.   While the young men will be absolved and assisted in their reintroduction into society, their victim has been abandoned.   No institution has thought about the social rehabilitation of the girl, who is so traumatized that she has dropped out of school.

Public furor has also been directed at many of the people of Montalto di Castro, who have shown solidarity with the rapists.   One local said “these guys are good boys, they don’t need to rape rather it was this girl that the same day, before of the party, had sex with another boy….”   Someone else commented “if I were 17 years old, I would line up to get with her….the girl is not serious. It is her fault.”   Even the mayor of the city weighed in, implying that native-born Italians are genetically incapable of rape, although for the immigrant population it is another story altogether. “Rape exists only when committed by Romanians” he said, and then added “the only animals in our region are the Romanian immigrants. They’ve got rape in their blood.”   When the Romanian community expressed its displeasure at his comments, he denied ever saying them. The victim’s mother, recognizing that this case is not without its racial and cultural overtones, commented that “my daughter is not getting justice because the boys are Italians.”

The disconcerting comments by the locals of Castro Montalto, along with the decisions by the Court of Appeal of Rome and the Juvenile Court of Rome, demonstrate that after many years of feminist and women’s struggles, Italian public opinion and its institutions still seem to adhere to the idea that women bring sexual violence upon themselves through their behavior.   In other words, when a woman decides to act in a manner not sanctioned by dominant values, her free expression implies a de facto sexual availability, which can be “conquered”, if need be, by means of violence.

In this interpretive light, an act of violence against a woman is, paradoxically, not a consequence of her oppression, but her freedom.   In fact, the freedom of women (and the resulting anxiety that women no longer carry on traditional cultural and national values) compels men to exercise their power and control through violence.   In short, violence against women increases proportionally to the amount of freedom and power that women acquire.

Rape of Europa

Violence against women is thus a manifestation of men’s fear about women’s freedom and mobility. This fear, as Italian scholar Tamar Pitch stresses, is “closely linked to fear about the future and the ‘other,’ which leads to the search for – or even the fabrication of- pseudo-homogeneous, pseudo-traditional cultural identities.” As a result, such sentiments lead to the criminalization of migrants, who are potential menaces to national “values.”

From this perspective, the two aforementioned cases illustrate perfectly how in Italy legal and political strategies often use the issue of rape in order to underline the boundaries between “we” and the “others”, “citizens” and “migrants”, “good women” and “bad women.”   According to the reigning criteria in the Italian legal and political discourse, sexual violence most frequently occurs either when a woman chooses to act   “inappropriately,” thus imperiling herself (considering specifically sex-workers), or when migrants rape white women (thus leading to strengthened security measures against immigration).

Once again, in Italy the body of women is used by the political and legal discourse to reinforce and reshape racist and/or moral ideologies and stereotypes.   And once again what is ignored is the structural inequality of power that creates the condition for the social control over women and also undermines women’s security.   And what is lost in the argument, once again, is the real suffering of women.

Letizia Palumbo is a visiting scholar at Columbia Law School, and a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Palermo, Department of Politics, Law and Society.   This fall at Columbia she is researching the limits of current feminist interpretations of sex-trafficking developed around the “victim” versus “agency” dichotomy.

Cross-posted from Gender & Sexuality Law Blog

The image at left is taken from the Northeastern University School of Law publicity that landed today in my faculty mailbox.   The text in the tan box in the upper left corner reads, “Faculty and students advocate together for those too-often underrepresented in the justice system.”  

That’s a nice message.

A woman sitting on the floor gazing upwards adoringly at a professor is not a nice message.  

It is as if the school is saying, “At  Northeastern, our professors tower over all others.   Here, women sit on the floor and beam at their older male professors.   We like that image so much we wanted to share it with the world.   It represents a typical interaction at our school.”

Who suggested this shot?   Why did the faculty member agree to it?   Why didn’t the students object?   Why didn’t the Marketing/Communications staff reject it?   Hey, Northeastern, you can do better.

-Bridget Crawford

“Come for the food…stay for the dudes,” beckons this campus-wide invitation to a “President and Provost Welcome Reception”   at Pace University.   In the photo above, the President appears at left and the Provost appears at right

Ok, ok, I “get it” that some marketing necessarily must be geared toward a “youth” audience– especially if  folks in  a school’s marketing department are tasked with the job of generating undergraduate attendance at a reception with the University’s top administrators.   But this particular announcement strikes me as (a) undignified; (b) inapt; and (c) not quite the image of a University that its leadership should project.

I, for one, don’t want anyone who is a “dude” to be the University President or the Provost.   “Dude” is casual slang.   I want educational visionaries and business-like rainmakers running the University (a healthy mix of both, preferably).   I do not want “dudes” running the University.  

Assuming (or hoping)  that students will attend the reception because the University President and the Provost are (self-proclaimed?) “dudes”   condescends to the intelligent demands and needs of adult students.   University students are adults.   They want leaders who are adults.   They do not want the President or Provost to be their best friend or wing-person.      

Even if a “dude” President or Provost were ok, why broadcast the fact that the school’s administration lacks diversity?   Some people will claim that “dude” is gender- and race-neutral.   “Diversity” certainly is not the word that popped into my mind when I saw this invitation.

-Bridget Crawford

The relative silence of a queer – or even a gay – voice in the health care reform debate of the last six months is confounding.   As someone who spent my 20’s and 30’s dealing with close friends and colleagues dying of AIDS, who watched many people become impoverished by their disease, and saw first hand how pre-existing conditions clauses rendered health insurance coverage useless when it precluded any coverage for HIV-related care, it strikes me that the lgbt community knows as well as any other group of people why these reforms – including a public option – are necessary.

But the implications of health care reform for the lgbt community extend well-beyond HIV – because the employer sponsored health insurance regime we live with is, essentially and unavoidably, hetero-patriarchal – it assumes the nuclear family as the typical unit needing and deserving insurance coverage. By insuring not only the employee but his spouse and minor dependents as well, our employment-centered health insurance paradigm imagines a male employee/head of household with a wife (who is not employed and therefore does not have her own insurance) and kids, all of whom were covered incident to the male adult’s employment. The family wage brought with it family benefits.

Rendered invisible, or at best marginal, in these policy choices around health insurance are those of us who cannot or will not get health insurance on account of a relationship to a husband or father who brings home both the bacon and a health insurance card.   But gaying the story doesn’t quite fix the problem.   Marriage equality advocates’ demands that same-sex couples be allowed to marry so that we too can get on the insurance policies of our well-employed partners somehow fails to get at the underlying problem of what is at bottom a health care delivery system that presupposes the nuclear family.

A queer approach to the issue would question the norm of a health care delivery system that privileges those people who are willing and/or able to organize their lives into a traditional household, with a head who is working a good job that includes health care coverage for all the rest in the family.   Just as it is wrong to make better health care available to those who can afford it, so too, the queer argument goes, it is wrong to make health care coverage turn on one’s ability to line up your life like the Brady family.   Good health care should have nothing to do with wealth or conformance with hetero-patriarchy.

Katherine Franke, cross-posted from Gender & Sexuality Law Blog