Matrimoni forzati. Implicazioni interculturali e connessioni giuridiche

The Istanbul Convention of 2011 established a clear link between the objective of gender equality and the elimination of violence against the ‘female’ gender and regulated directly the issue of forced marriages. Currently, in Italy, the reference legislation is represented by Art. 7 of the so-called ‘Codice Rosso’ approved in 2019, in a wider normative project dedicated to the criminal protection of victims of domestic and gender violence. This issue, from a strictly legal-positive point of view, must be correctly framed among the limitations to the freedom of individuals, especially women, determined by habits, customs, collective and relational value systems that put subjectivity second. However, a normative intervention that is limited to the classification of the case as a crime, on the basis of certain external morphological aspects, risks failing to grasp, in a truly inclusive and inter-cultural dimension, the plurality of meanings and the multiple relevance that individual behaviours could assume, with respect to the constitutional norms and the variety of values encapsulated in them. The repositioning of formal profiles, in which the semantic and normative dimension of the cultures to which they belong could be involved, could provide useful tools for a normative qualification/translation that better contextualises these practices, tracing ‘other’ meanings and, in relation to them, emancipatory solutions that do not bring into play the subjectivity of the ‘victim’ and his isolation from the social groups to which he belongs.