Institutional portal - Municipality of Milan

80% of it involves violence committed by people known to each other

Milan, 1 October 2020 – There have been 345 cases handled in the last 12 months by the Women and Minors Protection Unit of the local police, which deals in particular with the crimes envisaged by the so-called 'Red Code', a law which came into force in September 2019: 8 arrests, 21 precautionary measures and 37 placements in protected structures.

The crimes dealt with by the Unit, made up of 12 female and 9 male agents, as well as two officers, are mainly domestic abuse, sexual violence, stalking, child pornography, trafficking, enslavement and bullying, of which 62% are female victims and 38% are minors. In 80% of cases the interventions originate from mistreatment or violence carried out by known people.

Like the intervention followed during the lockdown months, which originated from an email sent to the local Police Headquarters. A young girl reported that she had been raped, but that she only knew the social nickname of the man who had abused her. From the analysis of the fourteen-year-old's Facebook profile it was possible to trace the nickname of the person reported and ascertain that the girl's mother was among his friends.

During the protected hearing, the minor confirmed that she had been the victim of sexual abuse by an acquaintance of the family, reporting three episodes that occurred at different times during the period in which she attended primary school, during which the man he had been delegated by the parents to pick up the little girl from the exit. He is currently under precautionary measures in prison, awaiting trial.

Also during the confinement, the agents of the Women and Minors Protection Unit arrested a man of Tunisian origins, AM, aged 38, for mistreatment of a woman of Chinese nationality, LZ, aged 56. During a patrol of the area, the officers were approached by the obviously frightened woman, without footwear and with a cut on the top of her head, who reported having been violently beaten with a stick and a chair inside her apartment by her company. While the woman was transported to hospital, local police officers went to her home, where the man was still located.

A similar dynamic was the one that led to the complaint of a 30-year-old man in April, still in full confinement. The woman, a victim of mistreatment, had run into the street with the excuse of throwing out the garbage, to escape her husband's constant harassment. Taken into care by the local police unit, she was made safe together with her two minor children, in collaboration with the ordinary court and the juvenile court.

In addition to crimes committed by known people, the Unit also intervenes in cases of violence such as that which occurred a few days ago in Piazza Missori, which led to the flagrant arrest of PIM, a 39-year-old of Romanian origins. Arrested red-handed for sexual assault and injuries, the man had just attacked and molested a 22-year-old girl, NL, and then attempted to escape upon the arrival of a patrol from Decentralized 5 of the local police who happened to be passing through the scene, flanked by a plainclothes patrol from the Unit for the Protection of Women and Minors.