Italy is once again shocked by another episode of gang rape at the hands of very young boys. After the outrage generated last year by similar cases in Palermo and Caivano, this time it happened in Catania. Seven teenagers, half of them minors, were arrested accused of having sexually abused a 13-year-old girl in a park in the Sicilian city in front of her 17-year-old boyfriend, who was forced to watch the scene.
“I express my solidarity with her, the State exists and will guarantee that justice is done,” promised the Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, who has declared that she is “very affected” by the news. Her deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini, leader of the League, maintained that in the face of this “there can be no clemency, only chemical castration.”
The Catania Prosecutor's Office is investigating what happened on January 30 when, around seven in the afternoon, the girl was walking with her boyfriend in Villa Bellini, a park in a central area of Catania. It was then that seven young men approached them and took them to the public bathroom in the park. According to the victim's testimony, she was raped by two of them, while the other five held her boyfriend. Analysis has shown traces of DNA from the two who committed the rape on the teenager's clothing.
When they were able to escape, the couple ran to look for help on a main street in the historic center and called the police, who quickly arrived with an ambulance. The next morning, the victim recognized the attackers at the police station. One of them, who is 19 years old, confessed to one of the social services workers that he had attended the rape and offered his help in identifying the rest, for which he is under house arrest.
The case comes after two 13-year-old cousins were raped in September by a group of six teenagers in Caivano, in the province of Naples. It also reminds us of the gang rape of a 19-year-old girl by seven young men, one of them a minor, who made her drunk and took her to a secluded area of Palermo before abusing her in turns.
Last weekend, hundreds of people attended a demonstration called by the feminist association Non Una di Meno in Catania to show their solidarity with the latest victim of this horror. “A few months after the rape of Palermo, this news has infuriated us, but unfortunately it has not surprised us,” Lara Torrisi, one of the participants, told La Repubblica. "It is always the same. We are not in front of monsters or abnormal subjects, but rather the rapist is the healthy son of patriarchy and rape culture,” she denounced.
