A study on domestic gender crimes and the protection of orphans: the experience of social services in Italy

Abstract

The orphans of domestic crime constitute the hidden face of human and family violence. Indirect violence on children in a family unit affects their imagination, their certainties, their emotional, affective and psychic world, their present and their future. From this emerges the need to ensure preventive interventions to support fragile parenting and in situations where educational competences are most at risk. To the pain of loss are added other difficulties of a different nature: material, emotional, social and judicial. The dramatic condition experienced by orphans for domestic crimes, of which gender-based homicides are often the main cause, calls for specific attention, which requires the deployment of adequate and efficient tools, capable of providing a rapid response to their multiple needs, also with reference to the new family context. This study aims to identify the real needs and requirements of the orphans of such crimes, good practices and critical points in the system, and this in response to both the demands of Article 19 of the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and Adolescent, which provides for the use of all legislative, administrative social and educational measures to protect children against all forms of violence, to prevent them from being orphaned three times over, due to the loss of both parents and the indifference of the state, and to other more recent European recommendations to prevent and combat violence against children, with particular reference to the family environment.