On 31st January 2024, the Sicilian city of Catania woke up to the news that a 13-year-old local girl had been gang raped in Villa Bellini, the city’s central park. Her aggressors, all seven of them Egyptian, were charged and detained.

The timing was significant. A mere three days later, the city would commence its yearly celebrations of its patron Saint Agatha, a 3rd-century teenage Christian martyr, a symbol of purity and chastity. Beginning in the morning of 3rd February, local brass bands would take to the streets followed by religious processions, culminating in evening fireworks from the Duomo.

The real celebrations would get underway after dawn mass on the 4th, when St. Agatha’s bust and her relics would be paraded from the Cathedral around the city for two days, returning on the 6th. Normal city life would cease as roads would be cut off, traffic deviated and stores closed as citizens would take to the streets.

The timing was even more significant for Italy’s populist government, who, as part of its hardline stance, had been outlining measures such as chemical castration for sex offenders and a zero-tolerance attitude to illegal immigration.

Two very distinct groups of people took to the street that year: One to protest the absence of societal responsibility over violence against women, and the other to venerate a saint. Both, to remember and honor young innocent women.

The Transfeminist group Non Una di Meno (Not One Woman Less), with city-specific factions across Italy, is known for its loud and visually provocative protests. Its war paint color is bright pink, used for flare guns, bandanas, shirts, and placards. Its war cry: “Let’s Disarm the Patriarchy!”

In contrast, the processions for Saint Agatha, proudly touted as the third largest Christian festival in the world, are an explosion of white. Devotees, in traditional tunics, follow the saint around the city, and barring the occasional rupture of applause or exclamations of devotion, remain a reasonably somber affair.

With rising numbers of reported cases of sexual assault, often pinned on Italy’s newly arrived immigrants, a wave of xenophobic rhetoric has swept over the Italian political landscape, with the left and right exchanging blows over clashing ideologies.

For example, Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini from the Northern League continues to use his platform to condemn sexual violence and immigrants in one fell swoop. His latest piece of sensationalism is the rape of a 12-year-old girl by her own Congolese father, which came to light in January 2025.

The horrific events in 2018 were revealed by the young woman in question to a trusted school teacher. The father has been arrested and a court hearing has been set for October 2025. Salvini’s response on his personal Instagram account reads:

“Prison is not enough: as the League has always proposed, chemical castration for this ‘father’, a criminal and a lunatic. With the hope of his repatriation to Congo, we do not need such characters in Italy. No comments on this from the left? No denunciations of ‘patriarchy’?”

The intersection of xenophobic attitudes, patriarchal structures, and violence against women in Italy reveals complex and divisive attitudes toward integration, tradition, and sex.

This article was written by Farida F. Alvarez for the Polis Project. You can read the full article here. 

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