Bangladeshi husband mistreated his wife, the public prosecutor: “He should be acquitted because it is a cultural custom required by the Islamic religion”. The judge for preliminary investigations had ordered the compulsory indictment.
The request from the prosecutor of Brescia asking for the acquittal of a Bangladeshi man who mistreated his wife. The victim: “Belonging to Islam cannot be an excuse”
He should be acquitted of the crime of mistreatment towards his wife because it is a cultural custom. This is the meaning of the words used by the public prosecutor of Brescia in the case of a 27-year-old woman originally from Bangladesh with Italian citizenship, mother of two daughters, victim of physical and psychological abuse by her husband, from whom she separated.
The story, told by the Giornale di Brescia, began in 2019, when the woman found “the courage to report after years of shouting, insults and beatings, under the constant threat of being taken back to Bangladesh permanently”.
However, according to the prosecutor, the behavior of the man – a first grade cousin to whom she was “sold for five thousand euros” in an arranged marriage (celebrated in her homeland) after the death of her father, as she explained to the Brescia newspaper – was just due to the teachings of Islam.
“The actions of compressing the moral and material freedoms of the offended party by today’s accused are the result of the cultural system and not of his conscience and desire to annihilate and debase his spouse to achieve supremacy over her, given that the disparity between the man and the woman is a result of his culture and of the Islamic faith, which belongs to the same offended party” we read in the conclusions filed by the parties in view of the conclusion of the trial, which will reach a sentence in a few weeks, in October.
The Prosecutor’s Office had immediately asked for the proceedings to be dismissed, but the investigating judge said no, ordering the compulsory indictment of the foreigner born and raised in Bangladesh in light of the fact that “there are certainly suitable elements to effectively support the accusation in court against her ex-husband”.
According to the public prosecutor, however, the alleged mistreatment reported by the woman falls within culturally oriented crimes, i.e. those behaviors sanctioned by Italian laws, but tolerated according to religious traditions (or even the rules set out in the Koran) in other countries.
Therefore “the man’s conduct matured in a cultural context which, although initially accepted by the offended party, turned out to be intolerable for her only because she grew up in Italy and with the awareness of the rights that belong to her and which led her to interrupt marriage – the prosecutor wrote again in the request for acquittal for the accused – to conform her existence to markedly Western canons, rejecting the way of life imposed by the traditions of the Bengali people and of the faithful to Islam, and of which instead the accused proudly was a bearer”.
The woman, who has lived in Brescia since she was four years old, however, could not bear to be forced to abandon her high school studies and segregated at home for years, as the Giornale di Brescia always reports: “The culture of origin cannot be an excuse. I was treated like a slave” she commented.
Source: La Repubblica