It is mistreatment to prevent your partner from expressing her ideas and reasons

Preventing his partner from expressing his ideas and not listening to his reasons triggers the offence ofdomestic violence if thepreventive behaviour is systematic. The Supreme Court thus rejected a man's appeal against his conviction for domestic abuse (Article 572 of the Criminal Code). As often happens, the defence's line of argument aimed to minimise the facts, making the conduct charged against the defendant part of physiological family quarrels.

The Supreme Court, however, is aware of the tensions associated with cohabitation and makes a clear distinction between these and gender violence, which not infrequently takes place within the home. The Supreme Court recalls that, on the subject of ill-treatment in the family, conduct between parties that confront each other on an equal footing, even if bitter, can be considered an expression of "family quarrelsomeness" and criminally irrelevant. Clashes in the context of which one mutually recognises one another's right to express one's point of view.

While the crime is configured when one subject prevents the other, with repeated violent or offensive actions, even from expressing his autonomous thought. The judges of legitimacy indicate the telltale signs of ill-treatment in a family context of heated disputes: the absence of listening to the other's will or judgement, the structural balancing of the relationship in favour of one of the parties on the basis of sexual identity, the power relationship linked to gender roles, with the adoption of behavioural patterns of constant and unilateral prevarication. Finally, there is the taking advantage of subjective conditions of vulnerability: age, pregnancy, health conditions or disability, in order to exert coercive control, such as to determine, by means of insults, humiliation or blackmail, the succumbing always of the same party.

In the case examined, the Court of Cassation states, "the existence of a situation of systematic abuse of the offended person has been coherently argued, so that the objective element of the crime of ill-treatment is integrated, which, according to constant case law, postulates the performance of several acts, criminal or not, carried out in successive moments, of a vexatious nature, such as to determine physical or moral suffering in the passive subject. For the Court it is irrelevant the short period of time, less than a year, during which the vexatious conduct was concentrated, because the law does not establish a minimum duration. Just as the fact that the woman had withdrawn the complaint and attempted to contact the defendant telematically when he was subject to the precautionary measure of theapproach prohibition does not count.

The Supreme Court has, in fact, also in the past, already had occasion to state 'that even the resumption of cohabitation and the offended person's retraction, especially in cases where the latter is in particularly vulnerable conditions, must be subjected to careful critical scrutiny,' reads the judgment, 'in order to verify whether they are really significant of the unreliability of the original accusations, or whether they are consequent to the continuation and escalation of the abusive conduct. In such eventualities a more incisive control is required, extended to the reasons for the variation of the statement, since it cannot be excluded that the unreliable or mendacious retraction constitutes a further and indirect element of confirmation of the original accusations'.