Outrage against femicide is spreading in Italy

“We have to react, so no one else has to feel the void I feel—the excruciating pain I feel constantly in the darkness of my room,” wrote Elena Cecchettin. Her sister, 22-year-old Giulia, was Italy’s latest victim of femicide: the murder of women. Ms Cecchettin shared her grief on social media as hundreds of thousands across Italy protested on November 25th, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. The demonstrations brought to a climax two weeks in which Italians have agonised as never before over the killing of women by men who are often their present or former partners.Relatives of the victims usually shun publicity. Not Elena Cecchettin. She used mainstream and social media to denounce the patriarchal values she blamed for the deaths of her sister and many of the other 105 women murdered in Italy in the year to November 19th. Another reason why the controversy over the death of her sister has raged like no other is a chance mingling of art and life. The drama of Ms Cecchettin’s disappearance—the discovery of her body in a ditch, the flight of her alleged killer and former boyfriend, his arrest in Germany and extradition to Italy—played out against the background of a cinematic phenomenon.