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. 

Sicily, a magnet for migrants, digital nomads, and pleasure seekers alike, is a microcosm of this multilayered reality. Long before being White Lotused or even Godfathered into people’s consciousness, Italy’s largest island has always been a central piece of Mediterranean history. Thanks to its strategic geographical position and wealth in raw materials, it has been crucial to Ancient Greece, the Romans, and the Normans; a jewel of the Arab Caliphate and a dominion of the Spanish Empire. 

Today, for migrants, it remains that all-important “gateway to Europe”. A mere 12 kilometers from the Tunisian coast, the southernmost island in the archipelago is very often the first point of entry for those making the treacherous journey across the Mediterranean. 

In the 3rd century Catania, a Roman and pagan society, Agatha, the 15-year-old daughter of a local noble family, was a committed and devout Christian. When she refused the advances of a Roman prefect, he had her arrested and tortured by soldiers. When she refused still, they hacked off her breasts. She died in her prison cell, tortured to death. 

Agatha died because she dared to say no to a man in power. 

Day 1: 4th Feb 2024

On the first day of the procession, Agatha leaves the Cathedral after dawn mass and is taken on an external tour of the city. Her jewel-encrusted bust is housed in a ferculum holding her remains. A priest stands alongside Agatha, while select devotees stand and receive flowers and votive candles from pious locals. 

Until the early twentieth century, Sicily upheld an extremely conservative culture, in which women could not leave their homes unless accompanied by men. To this day, traditionally, devotees are male. While this is slowly changing (it is not rare to see women and children in the traditional white tunic following the procession), those leading it and closest to the saint are still predominantly men. 

From a fourth-floor apartment balcony, three generations watch, speculate, and reminisce. They are taking a pit stop before rejoining this Sicilian Hajj. From above, the bustling street morphs into a white river revealing a two-pronged chain gang of some 3000 locals. At a glacial pace, they tug on 125-meter-long ropes and parade her through glorious and endless illuminated pretty primary-colored arabesque arches. 

Devotees sport the traditional white tunic, a visual callback to Sicily’s Moorish past. Frequently paired with contemporary Nike Air Jordans; the look is reminiscent of Muslim athleisure worn by young men heading to the mosque for Friday prayers. The devotees abstain from alcohol; the long nights warrant caffeine and sugar. They circle the city center like a Sicilian Mecca and wait.

Nearby, at the entrance to the local park, an angry pink t-shirt-clad crowd waves anti-patriarchy placards and chants “Sister you are not alone!”. Meanwhile, pint-sized Snow Whites, Spidermen, and a Frida Kahlos scurry in between rivers of somberly dressed adults. 

But the incongruous Mardi Gras masquerading and patriarchy protesting is mere background noise, for “A” conquers all. 

“A” is everywhere.

A for Agatha, Catania’s Queen of Hearts, embroidered in golden thread set against red velvet standards and draped from every balcony.

***

The gang rape in Villa Bellini on 31st January 2024 was the second incident of violence against women involving a minor in Sicily in six months. An equally disturbing attack took place in the capital city of Palermo, involving a young woman and seven local boys aged between 17 and 22, one of whom filmed the ordeal on his phone and shared it on Telegram. They were all sentenced to four and seven years in jail in November 2024. 

Speaking to the press at the end of the trial, the victim’s lawyer, Carla Garofalo, highlighted the fact that none of the young men apologized to the victim. “A letter was read by one of them in which he apologized to his mother, sister, girlfriend,” Garofalo said. “Not a word of apology to the victim.”

Inspired by the Argentine grassroots movement Ni Una Menos, who define themselves as a “collective scream against machista (sexist) violence,” the Italian Non Una di Meno took to the streets and squares in response to the attacks.

Their unifying chant was “Sister, you are not alone!”, and of the rapists, their banners proclaimed, “They are not Monsters. They are Healthy Sons of the Patriarchy”. 

In 2022, The Department of Public Safety reported that 43% of the total number of acts of sexual violence reported in Italy were committed by foreigners, a figure that the Italian government continues to weaponize to reinforce its anti-illegal immigration rhetoric. 

In the same year, the government launched a hardline policy against illegal immigration by outsourcing two migrant processing centers to Albania. One facility in Gjadër, northern Albania, is part of an agreement to manage asylum applications outside the European Union. Capable of holding up to 3,000 migrants, the center processes asylum claims for those rescued in the Mediterranean, with Italy managing proceedings remotely, without them ever setting foot in the country. 

Described by the president of the leftwing More Europe party as an “Italian Guantanamo,” the centers are slated to cost 800 million euros over the next five years. Since their launch, all three attempts to send asylum seekers to Albania for processing have been reversed by the Appeals Court in Rome on the grounds that detaining asylum seekers outside the EU may violate both Italian and European laws on asylum rights. 

Specifically, legal experts argue that conditions in offshore centers could fail to meet EU human rights standards, particularly regarding detention practices and medical care. 

The most recent case was in January 2025, when 43 individuals from Egypt, Bangladesh, Ivory Coast, and Gambia, originally apprehended at sea and sent to Albania, were all transferred to Italy. The case for whether Italy can legally process asylum applications in a non-EU country such as Albania will now be reviewed by the European Court of Justice at a hearing on February 25th. 

Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s response: if they (the magistrates) want to run the country they should run for parliament instead. 

Meanwhile, as a part of the European Union, Italy has an open-door policy for immigrants from neighboring EU states thanks to the union’s freedom of movement decree. In April 2024, it officially launched its Digital Nomad Visa for non-EU workers. While this may outwardly show a move toward innovation and modernity, minimum monthly earnings to qualify cannot dip below 2000 euros—a wage many young Italians can only dream of. 

Youth unemployment in Italy stood at 22.8% in 2024, while in Sicily, the figures stood at 31.2%. 

Day 2: 5th February 2024

On the second day of the procession, Agatha is taken from the cathedral at 5 pm and brought on an internal tour of the city. The procession culminates at Piazza Cavour in the early hours of the morning with a firework display, before being brought back to the cathedral, arriving at around midday. She is followed by devotees bearing candles and flowers throughout.

The atmosphere is an eerie mix of liturgical and subdued football stadium fervor. The streets teem with Agatha Chads bearing candles weighing up to 120 kilos. They must get them to the Piazza at the top of the avenue before Agatha’s pre-dawn arrival.

Clusters huddle around their respective maxi-candles, Caravaggio-esque, resting, regrouping, re-caffeinating. The mood intensifies. They rev themselves up, and one starts shifting from side to side, cocking his head back and forth like a bull about to charge. The relative silence is broken. His voice rings out.

“Citizens!” he cries out.

“Citizens!!”

“We are all devoted!!”

The crowds reply clamorously and break into spontaneous applause.

***

Saint Agatha is the symbol of the city. Male devotees howl Agatha’s name like defiant football fans from the stands. Kitted out in their white uniforms they are a team, an army almost, defending and honoring their territory. The devotion and fervor feel real and yet church attendance in Italy is at an all-time low (less than 19% of Italians claim to attend mass weekly).

The Prime Minister herself opted for Christian diplomacy when asked to comment on the gang rape in Villa Bellini, stating she was saddened that a young girl should be attacked, at the time a city remembered another young girl who died so many years ago, a Christian martyr (referring, of course, to Saint Agatha).

Meanwhile, Matteo Salvini jumped on the story as an opportunity to push the League’s longstanding pro-chemical castration stance. “Don’t talk to me about “tolerance” or “error,”” he said publicly shortly after the crime. “Facing such horrors, there can be no mercy but only one cure: chemical castration. I expect the proposal presented by the League to be voted on as soon as possible.”

In September 2024, a motion was passed by the lower house of parliament to set up a committee to draft laws to introduce hormone-blocking drugs as a viable treatment for sex offenders. This, despite outrage from the left, condemning the decision as “a return to the middle ages”, and more pertinently, overlooking studies that show that blocking male hormones and decreasing libido in sexual offenders without appropriate rehabilitative measures can potentially lead to more frustration-fuelled violence. The bill has yet to be enshrined in law. 

Three of the seven young men were underage at the time of the gang rape in Villa Bellini. The first to do so was of legal age and was tried as an adult. He received 12 years and eight months of jail time in October 2024. A second, underage member of the group was sentenced to four years and eight months in December 2024. The remaining five remain in custody and are awaiting their sentences.

At the time of the arrests, Claudia Caramanna, Judge and Head of the Juvenile Prosecution Service in Palermo countered Salvini’s remarks by saying: 

“Nationality has nothing to do with it…many young people have been abandoned by the institutions in suburban neighborhoods where there is nothing: resources are scarce, but we must act as soon as possible by increasing social services staff and providing facilities to recreate that sense of community which, in these places, has been lost.”

Non Una di Meno echoed this sentiment and publicly condemned the government and its attempts to weaponize violence against women in their fight against illegal immigration—a battle they’ve been fighting for almost a decade. “Time and again we see violence against women being used to legitimize racist and xenophobic interpretations of a phenomenon that is much more structural in our society as a whole,” they said.

Yet, in the days that followed the gang rape in Villa Bellini, Meloni-leaning press incessantly highlighted the Egyptian nationality of the offenders while reminding readers of similar crimes involving attacks on women by immigrant minors.

Day 3: 6th February 2024

On the morning of the third day, Agatha is brought home. She makes one all-important stop before re-entering the cathedral: St Benedict’s Church, where 18 cloistered nuns emerge at the steps, and from behind a cast iron railing, sing a gregorian cantata to her and all her wax-stained devotees. 

Agatha has been on the road for almost 18 hours. She approaches the finish line patient, weary; but determined devotees applaud. This is a feast of resilience and resistance. The heat haze from the candles down the sawdust-lined avenue in the pre-dawn twilight lends a dreamlike quality to the morning. Deafening fireworks follow Agatha’s arrival; as though breaking through the haze of slumber. 

Citizens, roused and triumphant, heap their votive candles into a waxy pyre. Agatha is now homeward-bound. 

Passing Villa Bellini, they make an unscheduled stop and say a solemn prayer for the 13-year-old girl and her boyfriend, savagely attacked a few days earlier. They press on, for the nuns are waiting.

***

In 2023, the story of the brutal murder of Giulia Cecchettin, by her ex-boyfriend Filippo Turetta shook the nation to its core and prompted widespread media and government attention. 

Giulia’s sister Elena, in a letter to the press a mere 8 days after her sister’s murder, called for action to be taken; for the State to take responsibility for feminicide and sexual assault, and to recognize that men like her sister’s murderer are “not monsters, but healthy sons of the patriarchy.” 

But when Education Minister Giuseppe Valditara claimed that “patriarchy no longer exists” and that “the increase in incidents of sexual violence is also linked to forms of marginalization and deviance, in some way stemming from illegal immigration”, Meloni defended him. 

“Violence against women is an issue that we are, unfortunately, far from resolving, she added. “There is certainly data indicating a significant impact of mass illegal immigration on this issue, which is one of the reasons Italy is working to stop mass illegal immigration.”

This sort of discourse predates the current government. In a country that has seen its population of immigrants rise from 1.5 million to just over 5 million in the last 20 years (legally documented at least), the xenophobia is real and palpable.

In 2017, when the migration crisis was just about to reach its peak with the arrival of 188,000 migrants on Italian shores the following year, the gang rape of a Polish tourist at the seaside town of Rimini by four men of African origin; Congolese, Nigerian and two Moroccan minors, proved to be a decisive moment. 

Meloni, then a rising political star and leader of Brothers of Italy, still on the fringes of Italian, launched an attack on her Facebook page:

“I ask this as a woman, as a mother, and as a citizen: does Laura Boldrini, the woman holding the highest office in the Italian Republic, really have nothing to say about the horrific Rimini rapes committed by a gang of Maghrebi scum? Is she truly willing, in the name of ideological defense of mass immigration, to accept sexual violence as a ‘necessary evil’ of multiculturalism?”

In Meloni-land, “multiculturalism” is a dirty word, where the implication is that defending immigrants means you’re a soft touch. This rhetoric echoes loudly in the Italian Twittersphere with “cultural agitators” like journalist Francesca Totolo, who was promoting her book entitled Women’s Lives Matter: When Immigration Kills (2024). 

In it, Totolo claims to highlight just how many women in Italy have lost their lives or endured sexual assault as a direct result of the government’s inadequate policies on immigration.

Her feed is a daily attack on “multiculturalism,” which amounts to links to sensationalist headlines involving crimes committed by immigrants, as well as thoughts on what she calls “toxic feminism and the woke dictatorship”. Her book and repetitive posts on X largely quote this government study from the Ministry of the Interior on young people and violence against women. 

Totolo has a knack for summarising the most salacious of statistics with the use of eye-catching pie-charts: 50% of all gang rapes were committed by immigrants, it is claimed, while 100% of all “forced marriages” were carried out by immigrants. 

The popular statistic that over 40% of rapes in Italy are committed by immigrants (who only make up 8.5% of the population) has long been discredited but continues to circulate among right-wing populist media. Alarmist headlines such as “Doors Open to the Next Rapist” from publications like La Verità (meaning, ironically The Truth) continue to peddle these figures, claiming, “It’s not racism, it’s statistics.” 

All the more alarming when such misinformation is repeated on The Spectator, a well-known conservative UK publication, only to provide an in-text link back to an Italian source that discredits the original figures.

Journalists who attempt to highlight structural problems within Italian society to address sexual assault cases rather than focus solely on the nationality of the suspects are accused of playing up to political correctness and engaging in “reverse racism”, arguing if the rapists are Italian, the left-leaning media give them more press to push their ‘anti-patriarchy’ agenda. 

The existence of native Italian sexual predators, it would seem, fits into the “woke brigade’s” claim that the government is failing them. For the right-wing populist government in power, this is more than just a slap in the face. This is philosophically and politically contrary to their entire belief system. For the state to claim responsibility for the moral fiber of its citizens, it would seem, would be to interfere with individuals as freely operating entities. And that’s just un-Italian. 

More worryingly, sex education at schools remains taboo. Italy is the last of six countries in the European Union not to have a compulsory sex education program (alongside Poland, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Cyprus, and Romania). 

A recent university study in association with the Italian Society of Sexology and Psychology reiterates that the lack of any sex education at schools “encourages the spread of dysfunctional and risky behaviors among young people, including an increase in sexually transmitted infections, a rise in homophobic and transphobic bullying incidents, and the distorted use of social media.” 

In February 2025 however, castration is still the current government’s main proposed response to curb sexual violence. 

***

Back in Sicily, women are taking a more grassroots approach to dealing with violence against women. In their 2024 book, Femminsmo Terrone (a pejorative term used to describe Italian southerners), Sicilian feminists and activists Claudia Fuzia and Valentina Amenta challenge entrenched beliefs about the North-South axis present in Italy, which, they argue extend to a global context. 

For Fuzia, Agatha is a feminist icon operating within a patriarchal system. One in which she may be the star, but not the protagonist. One where the male-dominated Catholic Church celebrates her alleged purity rather than her act of rebellion. 

Catania-based activists at the anti-violence group Thamaia also look to Saint Agatha as a Sicilian heroine and worthy poster girl for the UN International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. Agatha, they stated in a press release in 2023, is “too often assumed only as a symbol of purity.” Instead, they wished to “claim the strength and tenacity to oppose a patriarchal and oppressive power that has tried by all means to bend her.”

For Thamaia, Agatha should be remembered as a girl who dared to stand up for her beliefs and refuse a man in power. “In this” they added, “we recognize ourselves in her and recognize in her a symbol of our struggle.” Representatives from Thamaia along with Galatea (another anti-violence group based in the city) were present at a court hearing of the gang rape in Villa Bellini. They continue to provide safe spaces for victims of violence and lobby local authorities for increased awareness training and improved social services.

Agatha’s story is also being reframed by the performance group Ntuppatedde. In 2014, they revived a banned centuries-old tradition in which women would wear veils obscuring their faces, and act “provocatively” without repudiation during the Feast of Saint Agatha. Too scandalous for the time, the clergy outright abolished it in 1870. 

This 21st-century incarnation of the Ntuppatedde has performers in white ceremonial gowns and veils, holding a red carnation. They are mute, but follow the music played by traditional bands on the day before the festivities and dance–as prayer, community, and liberation–among the locals. Their goal is to bring a more feminine and joyful presence to a feast that honors the death of a woman at the hands of a man. 

The Catholic Church, however, has not welcomed its revival: “I was sorry to see once again those girls dressed in white,” remarked Luigi Renna, Archbishop of Catania last year. “Saint Agatha is dead, she didn’t go for a dance at the disco. To honor her, it’s best to wear the tunic and pray the rosary.”

In 2025, the performance group escaped any comments from the Archbishop, but their presence was felt and in large part, welcomed by the city. 

The synchronicity of the religious processions and the feminist protests last February following the gang rape reveal two sides of the same coin: Two young women who said no to men more powerful than them. 

While Meloni’s hardline immigration policies and headline-grabbing proposals like chemical castration for sex offenders direct the issue toward one of criminality linked to foreign nationals, the feminist movement’s emphasis on structural issues such as the lack of sexual education highlights a critical gap in addressing the root causes of violence. In Meloni’s patriarchy, in the pursuit of power, violence remains constant, whether through physical dominance or verbally in the form of hate speech. 

The complex intersection of Italy’s political discourse, in its instrumentalizing of sexual assault cases, and ongoing debates over the roles of sexual education as well as immigration, reveals a painfully divided society. 

This duality is present in Meloni herself, her rallying cry, “I am a woman, I am a Christian, I am Italian.” And yet she is deaf to the Non Una di Meno’s anti-machista scream, “Sister, you are not alone!”