Italian Supreme Court of Cassation, Criminal Section VI, No. 43283/2018, 3 July 2018

Recourse against conviction for the crime domestic violence, victims being the defendant’s two minor daughters. Role of cultural factors influencing the offending conducts and distinction with the crime of abuse of means of correction and discipline.

Art. 571 Italian criminal code

Art. 572 Italian criminal code

The crime of domestic violence, and not that of abuse of means of correction and discipline, shall be deemed to be committed when a parent repeatedly carries out acts of physical and moral violence against a minor child, even if the agent considers such acts to be compatible with a corrective and educational purpose, in keeping with his cultural conception, since this circumstance cannot be taken into account in any way for the purposes of defining the dividing line between the offence of domestic violence and that of abuse of means of correction and discipline, and both the conception of the relationship between father and children and the educational method that are widespread in the defendant’s country of origin must be considered irrelevant.

(Case concerning a defendant who subjected his daughters to repeated acts of physical violence, such as pushing, slapping, kicking, punching and clutching their necks, and moral violence, addressing them with seriously offensive words, claiming that this was a “corrective” response to the fact that the girls behaved in a manner deemed inconsistent with their culture or dated boys. In light of these cultural reasons, the defence argued that the Court of Appeal had wrongly qualified as crime of domestic violence the conducts, that integrated instead a case of abuse of the means of correction and discipline.)