High-profile femicides in Italy were followed by more help-seeking, not a detectable rise in killings

When attention becomes action

Public discussion of violence against women can make abuse more recognizable and support services more visible. But extensive coverage of a killing also raises concerns about imitation. A preprint by Augusto Cerqua, Marco Letta, Costanza Giannantoni and Gabriele Pinto, all at Sapienza University of Rome, examines these competing possibilities using Italian data from 2017–2024.

Their central finding is a difference between seeking help and lethal violence: two highly publicized intimate-partner femicides were followed by more calls to Italy’s national anti-violence helpline. After the most prominent case, police reports of abuse and stalking also exceeded forecasts. The study found no evidence of a corresponding increase in femicides.

These results support the possibility that public attention brings hidden violence to light. They do not establish that publicity reduces killings, or that higher reporting necessarily means underlying abuse has become less common.

Building a national comparison

The researchers assembled a manually checked database of 822 femicide victims, defining femicide as the intentional killing of a woman or girl because of gender. They combined nongovernmental and journalistic sources, classified victim–perpetrator relationships and motives, and linked monthly counts to police records and helpline statistics. The database covers documented cases under the study’s classification rules, rather than an exhaustive administrative register.

To measure public prominence, they counted coverage across 144 Italian news outlets. Cases from 2019 onward were eligible for the attention ranking, allowing earlier observations to inform forecasts. Social-media activity, searches and demonstrations provided additional evidence of attention around the largest event.

The main comparisons concerned Giulia Tramontano, killed by her partner in May 2023; Giulia Cecchettin, killed by her former partner in November 2023; and Saman Abbas, killed by family members in 2021. Cecchettin’s case attracted exceptional attention. Abbas and Tramontano received broadly comparable, though lower, levels of coverage.

Because attention spread nationally, the researchers had no clearly unexposed Italian region to use as a control. Instead, they forecast what each outcome might have looked like without the event, using its earlier trends, seasonal patterns and other pre-event information. Their main forecasting tool was TabPFN 3.0, checked against alternative models.

Larger attention, broader response

Over May–October 2023, helpline calls following Tramontano’s killing were an estimated 29.5% above the cumulative forecast. Police reports of abuse, stalking and sexual violence showed no comparable sustained response.

Following Cecchettin’s killing, calls were approximately 47.5% above forecast over November 2023–April 2024. Recorded abuse against women was 22.8% higher and stalking reports 12.8% higher. Sexual-violence reports did not show a similarly clear departure from the model’s predictive ranges.

These percentages compare observed totals with modeled alternatives, not simply with the previous six months. Their magnitudes varied across forecasting methods, although the positive pattern for calls, abuse reports and stalking after Cecchettin remained.

Calls increased among both victims and relatives or friends. Cecchettin-related increases extended across Northern, Central and Southern Italy; Tramontano’s clearest regional evidence was in the North and Center. A longer analysis found elevated national helpline use through the end of 2024, but could not separate the two events’ contributions after November 2023.

Publicity alone was not enough

Abbas’s case produced no similarly robust, coherent mobilization. Its estimated helpline response changed substantially across model specifications. Nor did the researchers find comparable positive responses after the lower-salience intimate-partner killing of Alessandra Matteuzzi or the non-partner femicide of Nicoletta Indelicato.

Sharon Verzeni’s highly publicized killing, which the researchers did not classify as gender-motivated femicide, also showed no comparable increase. Together, these contrasts suggest that the intensity and framing of attention, and the relationship involved, may matter. Comparisons among a few different cases cannot isolate those mechanisms conclusively.

What the evidence cannot settle

Neither the curated femicide data nor independently recorded female homicides showed evidence of increased lethal violence after the two prominent intimate-partner cases. Estimates after Cecchettin generally pointed downward, but killings are rare and uncertainty was substantial. The authors explicitly decline to claim an established preventive effect.

Causal interpretation also requires that no other contemporaneous development explains the departures from forecast and that earlier patterns remain informative. The paper examines a domestic-violence law passed around Cecchettin’s case, but a national forecasting design cannot remove every competing explanation. Its main uncertainty bands are pointwise predictive ranges, not causal confidence intervals.

The practical implication is therefore conditional: intense public attention may encourage contact with support services and authorities without a detectable rise in lethal imitation. Whether planned awareness campaigns can reproduce that response remains unknown, and greater help-seeking still requires adequate services, protection and institutional follow-through.