My sister was killed in a feminicide. This is my story of loss, rage, and the fight for change.
Nobody prepares you for losing a sister, not when she is 22. It was the evening of November 11, 2023, around 22:00. I was writing an essay for university that was due the next morning, so I had planned a long night of writing. At the same time, I was texting back and forth with my sister. She was shopping and sending me pictures of potential dresses for her graduation. At 22:43, our conversation came to a halt. She stopped replying, and in that moment, I didn’t know that her last text would be the final message I would ever receive from her, the last time in my life I would speak to my sister. I kept working until 3:00, not knowing that back home in Italy, my sister had been murdered in cold blood by her ex-boyfriend. By the time I went to bed, her body was already in the mountains, abandoned in the cold and dark.
The next morning my brother called me and asked if I knew where she was, because she hadn’t come home the previous night. I panicked, knowing instantly that something bad had happened. That afternoon I posted on social media, alerting people that my sister was missing and that she had been with her ex-boyfriend. I begged people to share it because I felt so helpless that I didn’t know what else I could do. My family and I have had to endure things I had only ever read about, but that day, I was dragged into the tragic reality of feminicide.
When I returned to Italy to be with my family, I immediately noticed that our house was surrounded by journalists. Little did I know that this would become my life for the following three weeks.
When feminicides happen, the media focus on the killer and their previous life, most of the time defending them or creating a narrative of surprise: “How could such a good guy do something like that? Surely there must have been a trigger for such behavior.” This is where victim-blaming begins. Nobody tells you that when you lose a sister to feminicide, you also have to endure the violence of the media that falsely portray your sister as being responsible for her own death by provoking the man who killed her. That is now your life: not even being able to walk the dog because journalists camping outside of your house will chase after you for a comment, asking insensitive questions like “Would you ever forgive him?” All I experienced in those days were the constant presence of media outside of my house and an emptiness inside my chest that wouldn’t go away.
A forensic psychologist working on the case told us that for families of missing people, time stops, and they feel stuck in the moment they lost their loved one. I felt like that for a week, not knowing or caring what time or day it was. All I did was hurt. Day after day, I tried to silence the pain: I spent most of the time scrolling through social media, desperately looking for distraction. But it’s hard to find distraction when the entire country is talking about your sister going missing.
One thing I started noticing was people’s rage. Feminists were angry because another sister had disappeared. Everybody knew that there was little chance of her returning safely, but seeing people express solidarity and rage made me feel less alone, even though I didn’t know the names of most of the people showing support.
One week after my sister went missing, her body was found. I was having breakfast when the person I was with received a call, and they told me what had happened. Articles describing the tragic news were all over the internet. I asked myself how it was possible that newspapers knew my sister had been killed before I did, and why nobody cared to tell her family before selling the news to the press.
I struggled to understand my feelings. I had suspected she was dead all along, and now I had confirmation. I would never hug my sister again. I would never see her graduate. I would never laugh at her jokes again.
The trial is still ongoing and will probably continue for another two or three years. Every few months, I am reminded of what I had to go through — and what my sister had to go through — by an article I come across in the news.
I survived this tragedy, but I was also mutilated by it. My sister’s absence is louder than ever, and I think about her every day. Two years later, the pain is still unbearable, and I wonder if I will ever be able to fully recover. Even if I tried to ignore the pain, it would not be possible to move on.
Sometimes I ask myself how I managed to survive this, to be strong enough to deal with the death of my sister, and how I found the courage to speak up and turn this tragedy into a message. I remember my reason for using the unwanted media attention to create an amplifying platform for social protest: after days of seeing sensationalism and trauma porn in the news, I had to change the narrative. I needed to talk about what happened in my own words, words that respected her and showed that feminicide is the result of a systemic problem. She was the 103rd victim in Italy in 2023. That number alone shows that we are not doing enough to protect women from the brutality of patriarchy.
I decided that the next time I was asked to go on TV, I would take the opportunity. I would have people’s attention, and use it to speak the truth: feminicides are not isolated cases committed by a few monstrous men. They happen all the time, and we are all responsible for failing to change the culture that makes them possible.
After my speech, I received more questions about the patriarchy, and saw that journalists wanted to hear more. I also received a lot of hate, from public figures and anonymous accounts online. But I didn’t care, I was already going through the worst pain I had ever experienced.
Not everyone hated me, though: outside my house, I saw people organizing. Flyers and posts informing about marches and protests spread across Italy. For a week, people all over the country hoped that we wouldn’t lose another sister. And we were enraged by the fact that Giulia, too, had been killed. From my small town to bigger cities, all the way to a national protest in Rome with more than 500,000 people, Italy was screaming and crying for its daughters, not only for my sister but for all victims of feminicide.
Thousands of people showed up for my sister’s funeral. Instead of observing a minute of silence, people shook their keys and made noise. Everybody was tired of being silent while living in a system that had let us down and failed to protect us. That rage felt like a hug. People were standing by our side, refusing to accept another woman killed simply because she had decided to leave a man. In December, there was even a protest in Vienna. Many people who knew Giulia’s story gathered publicly and raised their voices in the city I now call home.
The uproar over my sister’s murder did not radically change things. Institutions did not listen, or at least not completely. People still underestimate the problem: in 2024 alone, feminicides in Italy still numbered over one hundred. But our fight is not over. If they will not stop killing us, we will not stop protesting. We will take to the streets in the thousands, and we will be loud. If even just one more of us doesn’t come home, we will get ready to tear down the whole system.
Sources:
Non Una Di Meno. Osservatorio nazionale NUDM. Osservatorio Nazionale NUDM. (2025). Casi di femminicidi lesbicidi trans*cidi monitorati nel 2024 in Italia. www.oeh.at/p109
Elena Cecchettin is a microbiology student at University of Vienna and activist.