Sechetin familyA verdict in a murder case in Italy is expected on Tuesday and has sparked a heated debate on the issue of violence against women.
Prosecutors have asked that Filippo Turetta, 22, be sentenced to life in prison for stabbing to death his ex-girlfriend Giulia Cechettin last November.
Over the past year, more details have emerged about the murder, which paints a picture of a young woman abused by her possessive ex-boyfriend who refused to accept the end of their relationship.
The case that captivated Italians pushed concepts of femicide, patriarchy and male violence into the headlines.
On November 11, 2023, Ms Cecchettin, a 22-year-old biomedical engineering student from the province of Venice, took her ex-girlfriend shopping for clothes for her upcoming graduation.
That same evening, they stabbed him more than 70 times and left the student’s body wrapped in plastic bags at the bottom of a ditch.
Then, he disappeared. For a week, the Italians followed the search for the couple with bated breath. Ms Cecchettin’s body was met with an unprecedented outpouring of grief on November 18. The next day, Mr Turetta was arrested in Germany. He admitted killing Ms Cecchettin and was extradited to Italy.
To raise awareness of the signs that control relationships, Ms Cecchettin’s family recently shared a list she wrote a few months before her death, titled “15 Reasons I Should Break Up With Him”.
In it, Ms Cecchettin said Mr Turetta insisted he had a “duty” to help her study, complained if she sent him fewer emoji hearts than usual, didn’t want her to go out with friends and needed to text him all the time. .
“They are typical signs of possessiveness,” Giulia’s father Gino Cechetin told the BBC. “He denies her her own space, or always insists on being included. He always needs to know everything she says to her friends or her therapist.
“We later realized she thought she was the cause of his pain, she felt responsible for it,” he said.
In an 80-page statement written from prison in childlike handwriting, Mr Turetta said he spent every day after breaking up with Ms Cecchettin hoping to get back together with her. “I felt I could accept no other outcome,” he wrote.
In his police interview Mr Turetta confirmed that on the night he killed her, Ms Cecchettin had told him she was too dependent and needy.
“He yelled that I needed her, that it wasn’t fair,” Mr Turetta said, adding that he killed her after getting “very angry” when she tried to get out of the car.
“I was selfish and now I realize it,” he wrote. “I couldn’t help but think how incredibly unfair that was to her and the promising and wonderful life she had ahead of her.”
ReutersMr Turetta’s lawyer, Giovanni Caruso, has argued that his client should avoid an “inhuman and degrading” life sentence and push back against allegations that the killing was premeditated.
“He’s not Pablo Escobar,” Mr Caruso said – according to Giulia’s father, who told the BBC he felt “violated again”.
Stories of femicide routinely top the news agenda in Italy, but Giulia Cechettin’s story attracted unusual attention from the start. The week-long search for the young couple held the crowd; The revelation that Ms Cecchettin had been killed just days before her graduation shook him. More than 10,000 people attended her funeral.
But it was a tearful and angry interview given by Giulia’s sister Elena, in which Filippo Turetta was not a “monster” but a “healthy son of a patriarchal society”, that sparked a heated debate about modern male violence and gender roles. Italy.
Elena’s words echoed. Suddenly, patriarchy – a concept that many thought was mysterious or irrelevant – was widely discussed.
“If you’re a man you’re part of a system that teaches you that you’re worth more than women,” Mr Sechetin told the BBC.
“This means that if you are in a relationship everything has to go through you … and the patriarch cannot say: ‘I don’t love you anymore’, because that goes against his sense of ownership.”
In November, at the launch of a foundation set up by Gino Cechettin in memory of Giulia, Education Minister Giuseppe Valditara argued that patriarchy does not exist in Italy and that the rise in sexual violence is “linked to segregation and perversion”. Illegal Immigration”.
The comments caused outrage. “Giulia was killed by a respectable, white Italian man,” hit Elena Sechetin. “My father did something to stop the violence. What is the government doing?
After his daughter’s death, Gino Sechetin threw himself into the battle to teach teenagers how to manage emotions and relationships, touring schools to tell students his daughter’s story.
She hopes sharing Giulia’s own voice and words will help others — like a voice message she sent to a friend in which she was moved by Mr. Turetta’s insistence and guilt over his suicidal thoughts. “I wish I could disappear,” he says. “But I’m worried he might hurt himself.”
Elisa Ercoli of Differenza Donna, a charity that fights gender-based violence, told the BBC the messages had had a clear impact, adding that her organization was receiving a large number of calls from parents who had spotted similar behaviors in their daughters. “We think bruises are a problem but psychological violence is a problem in many cases,” he said.
The government department said there has been a surge in calls to the national anti-violence helpline since Ms Cecchettin’s killing and the number of calls is now 57% higher than last year.
But NGOs and opposition politicians are demanding that Prime Minister Georgia Meloni’s government take concrete steps to prevent and punish violence against women, such as “effective lessons” in schools.
“The Sechetin family is a grain of sand compared to what the government has the power to achieve,” said Francesca Ghio, a left-wing councilor in Genoa who recently publicly revealed she was raped as a 12-year-old – she said of the decision. Inspired by the “power” of the Cecchettin family so to speak.
“They are turning their pain into love and action. We cannot stand idly by.
As the 10-week trial neared its end, Mr Sechetin said he was calm.
Recalling his “perfect daughter” who is now a household name, Mr Sechetin said there would be a “before” and an “after” of Giulia’s murder.
But though Italy had gained a token, his loss was incalculable. “I realized that I can’t rewind life and time, and I realized that no one can give me back the Giulia,” he said.
