The judgment

'Fat girl, you suck!' to 11-year-old daughter, father convicted of abuse

The Supreme Court definitively dismissed the appeal of the parent convicted under Article 572 of the Penal Code

24 September 2025

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The criminal offence ofmistreatment in the family is committed for the parent who repeatedly shows contempt for his daughter's physical appearance.

The Court of Cassation, in its judgment No. 30780 of 15 September 2025, definitively rejected a father's appeal against the decision of the Court of Appeal of Venice that had convicted him of the offence provided for in Article 572 of the Criminal Code.

During the period from January to July 2020, the man had, with 'repeated frequency', addressed his then 11-year-old daughter with highly disparaging phrases.

'Fat girl, you are disgusting, you arouse repulsion in me and in those who look at you', he had told her several times, 'hurting,' the decision reads, 'her personality and causing a debasing regimen of life', also in view of her 'particular vulnerability' due to her age.

The highly offensive conduct had been repeated until the episode of 28 July 2020 in which, again for reasons of 'food hygiene', the father assaulted the girl 'even physically with apercussions', which were absorbed into the charged offence.

The Sixth Criminal Section, in confirming the decision of the judges of merit, clarified that the crime of mistreatment, "if proven in terms of habituality", integrates the conduct of repeated denigration carried out by a father against his teenage daughter "such as to cause her a debasing and humiliating climate of life because concerning a subject, the external appearance of a subject in full puberty, in respect of which the fragile sensitivity of the passive subject acts as an unequivocal key to interpret the intensity of the suffering suffered by the offended person when, as in this case, the offensive phrases, as well as being gratuitous, have contents of extreme gravity with respect to the physiological growth of the minor, because they are the manifestation of an obvious contempt, even more so because of the paternal origin of the same.

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