Italian Court Convicts Parents of Abusing Gay Son
metroweekly.comdiversion or treatment programs designed to decrease the risk of recidivism.According to the Italian newspaper La Stampa, the now-17-year-old’s father read his son’s diary in 2020, when the youth was 14, and discovered the boy was attracted to other males.
The father then imposed various punishments on his son, forcing him to do military-style training runs at night, refrain from shaving, expose his genitals, and read pages from his diary out loud.He also accessed his son’s online social media accounts, monitoring sites he visited and restricting who he could communicate with.When those punishments didn’t work, the father sought help from a psychologist in the hope that the psychologist would affirm the parents’ conservative worldview.
However, the psychologist refused to take on the son as a client, explaining to the parents that homosexuality is not a disease.In January 2021, when the boy was 15, the father gave him one month to prove he’d engaged in sexual intercourse with a girl.
The son sought help from a school psychologist, who reported the parents to authorities for suspected abuse.The son, who will turn 18 in six months, has received compensation from his parents for their mistreatment and is living far from the family home, with assistance from his lawyer.The sentence is being handed down at a time when Italian society is experiencing a backlash from cultural conservatives, dovetailing with efforts by the country’s fascist ruling party, the Brothers of Italy, to crack down on homosexuality and gender nonconformity as part of a larger plan to grow the country’s birth rate as a way of reasserting Italian national identity.As The Guardian has reported, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government has pursued “pro-family” policies, including discouraging women from having abortions, discouraging displays of homosexuality, and even rolling back rights of same-sex couples by erasing non-biological parents from children’s birth certificates.Several local.
