The INAF Brera Astronomical Observatory is organizing a series of monthly meetings for the year 2025 on the topic of violence and gender issues in academic and non-academic settings, entitled: “When gender violence does not exist”.
Third conference title: “Rape trial, rape trial: history of a crime”
Speaker: Loredana Garlati – Professor at the Department of Law of the University of Milan-Bicocca
Date and location: April 10, 2025 – 2:30 pm – Cupola fiore at our headquarters in Milan
Abstract: the meeting takes its cue from the RAI broadcast (Rape trial) of 1979, which for the first time documented the progress of a rape trial and described how prejudices can transform the victim into the accused (what we now call secondary victimization). The cameras entered the courtroom to tell the story of Fiorella, a rape victim, the passionate speech of Tina Lagostena Bassi and, in contrast, the clichés exhibited by the defense lawyers. This will be the occasion to retrace the long road that led to the 1996 reform, when the classification of the crime of rape among crimes against morality, morality and family order was abandoned to arrive at the qualification of sexual violence as a crime against the person. The two penal codes of united Italy will be compared to grasp their continuity and discontinuity. Some recent sentences will also be examined to demonstrate how in some cases the language of the courts remains discriminatory and how, despite the progress of the law, a certain cultural legacy still survives that is difficult to defeat.
