Protecting women's human rights through criminalisation: some considerations about the case of forced marriages in Italy

The paper is an exploratory attempt to make some considerations, based on recent concrete data, around the role that criminal law can play against forced marriage. This is a peculiar form of culture-driven violence against women, which (re-)emerged in the context of western multiethnical and multicultural societies as a result of immigration in the past decades. After framing the background and the phenomenon, as well as the international legal context and debate, the focus will be on the case of Italy, where an ad hoc offence has been introduced in 2019. In fact, this kind of legislation, especially in the field of culturally motivated crimes, is often criticised by scholars, who consider it to be merely “symbolic” and risking to submerge existing cases even more. However, the ministerial reports realised in Italy about the incidence of denounced forced marriages show an increase of them from a year to another. The objective of this article is thus to reflect on such evidence, also through a comparison with other empirical studies concerning female genital mutilations, arguing that criminalisation can actually have a concrete role of protection of human rights, specifically those of women, empowering victims and giving them a concrete instrument of opposition.