If the Court becomes the Sports Bar

A girl who appears late in the evening with a stranger knows what to expect. Especially if she has already had relations, she is 'in a position to imagine the possible developments of the situation'. After all, the 'fashion' of northern European girls, Icelanders in particular, to give themselves sexually to strangers at the first meeting is well known. These are not 'sports bar' speeches, these are the considerations made in a court of law, by the judges and defenders of a young man accused of sexual violence. A crime that the Court of Macerata had ruled out, with a sentence overturned, on 21 October last, by the Court of Appeal of Ancona, which sentenced the defendant to three years, passing a blow on an anachronistic verdict. For the Macerata judges, the girl, an Icelandic minor, was not credible. Who can go in a car at night with a stranger without imagining that she will have to 'indulge'? How is it possible that a 'robust' young woman cannot, in the cramped space of a small car, open the door and escape? A thought that, for Fabio Maria Galiani, the victim's lawyer, is reminiscent of the argument about the impossibility of raping a woman in tight jeans. The sketch and the behaviour of the young woman led the judges to conclude that she must have been, from the start, predisposed to give herself to the defendant. The psychological consequences and the complaint were probably the result of disappointment over a sexual relationship that was perhaps 'too fleeting' and did not go 'according to his expectations'. It was up to the Court of Appeal to turn the clocks back to 2025. And to remember that the Istanbul Convention, prohibits using the victim's past sexual conduct to discredit her trustworthiness. A pro memoria on the prohibition to include women victims of violence in the category of those who, after all, 'brought it on themselves', would also have served the Court of Turin well. The judges, in Judgement 2356/2025, while condemning a defendant for aggravated injuries - with a suspended sentence - to the detriment of his wife, acquitted him of mistreatment, for which a single assault is not enough. Specifically, the lady was not considered credible in claiming habitual mistreatment. Under the lens ends her private life, a new relationship, the ability to bring up her children, a conflictual relationship. Above all, she weighs the lack of tact in communicating the end of the marriage to her husband: in a 'brutal' way with a watshapp message. The sentences 'you're a whore, you've ruined a family, you don't earn shit, you'll go hungry', to be considered almost as the fruit of bitterness, humanly understandable 'for the dissolution of the domestic community'. If the lady is then punched, in 'an access of rage' so much that her face has to be reconstructed with 21 plates, the crime of grievous bodily harm is triggered. But the defendant cannot be considered socially dangerous, because he would not do it with others. He did it with 'his' wife, whose behaviour was not 'irreproachable'. Not uncommon in the courts is the habit of downgrading domestic violence to couple's quarrels. A conclusion censured by the Supreme Court, for the umpteenth time with sentence 35435 of 30 October, the Supreme Court upheld the appeal by the public prosecutor's office against the acquittal of the defendant from the crime of mistreatment to the detriment of his companion. A decision taken completely ignoring the testimony of a friend of the woman who had told of having witnessed the verbal and physical aggression. The Court of Appeal's conclusion was laconic: 'beyond what the friend may have said', there was no one-sided violence, only conflict. Why the witness was considered unreliable is unknown.