Violence against women, 89 victims every day

89 women are victims of gender crimes in Italy per day, according to reports collected by the anti-crime divisions of the police headquarters. In 62% of cases it is a question of mistreatment in the family. In 72% of cases of femicide the perpetrator is the husband or ex-husband, in one case out of two he used a knife. These are some of the data released on the occasion of the presentation in Catania of the police prevention campaign against violence against women ‘This is not love’, now in its fifth edition this year. The highest rate of women who turn to the police for warning requests is recorded in the southern regions, in particular in Sicily; and it is precisely from this region, from Catania, a city shaken in the recent past by some serious episodes of femicide, that it is necessary to say enough. With the project ‘This is not love’ the State Police renews its commitment to sensitize, in a simple and linear way, the victims of violence and not only, in the belief that reading the stories told in the brochure, unfortunately all true, represents a stimulus to ask for help and to report.Thanks to the initiatives already carried out by the Police in the field of prevention, it was possible to record a slight decrease in the trend of murders of women compared to murders in general: if in the period January-August 2020 the women victims of femicide were 48% of all those killed, in the same period of 2021 the index drops to 41%. The figure of women leaving small children rises: in January-August 2020 it was 25%, while in the same period of 2021 by 31%; it is 40% if we consider the murders committed up to the date of publication of the brochure.