“I still think about her many times”: adolescents’ emotional and cognitive reactions to a feminicide in their community

Background: This study explores the emotions and thoughts of adolescents from Piacenza in response to the femicide of a thirteen-year-old local resident, which occurred on October 25, 2024. Methods: The research involved ten adolescents (6 males, 4 females) aged between 14 and 19 who attended a local psycho-educational center. Through semi-structured interviews analyzed using NVivo, the study investigated participants’ initial reactions to the news, their emotional processing in the following days, their perceptions of femicide, and the prevention strategies they considered relevant. Results: The results reveal a wide range of emotions, including surprise, disbelief, anger, sadness, empathy, disgust, and fear. Adolescents reflected on the perpetrator’s responsibility, the concept of femicide, and the perceived risks within intimate relationships, showing both critical awareness and occasional justifications of the crime. Conclusions: By integrating these psychological findings with a socio-legal analysis of the Italian legal framework, this article points out a critical “prevention gap” where legal norms and judicial protections fail to translate into the lived experience and safety of younger generations. The study highlights the importance of analyzing adolescents’ emotional and cognitive responses, an age group that has received limited attention in the femicide literature, in order to better understand the diffusion of social awareness and the perception of risk within youth relationships.