Directive EU 2024/1385 on Violence Against Women: Pluralism Recognised, Pluralism to be Guaranteed
14 June 2027 is the deadline by which the twenty-seven Member States of the European Union must transpose into their national legal systems the Directive (EU) 2024/1385 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 May 2024 on combating violence against women and domestic violence. In Italy, the European Delegation Act 2024 (Law no. 91 of 13 June 2025) has conferred on the Government the necessary mandate, but the implementing legislative decree has not yet been adopted. The Italian legislature has in the meantime taken significant steps within the framework of the Codice Rosso: Law 168/2024 strengthened existing protection measures, and Law 181 of 2 December 2025 introduced femicide as an autonomous criminal offence. The National Plan against Violence against Women 2025-27, adopted by the Department for Equal Opportunities, explicitly references the Directive as a framework for national policies — a signal of institutional awareness that does not, however, substitute formal transposition. The question this focus seeks to raise is whether formal transposition by the deadline will be sufficient, or whether the real risk is an implementation that ignores one of the Directive's most innovative dimensions: the recognition of the plurality of victims.
Among the novelties introduced by the Directive, the most significant on the theoretical and legal level is intersectional discrimination as an operational category in victim protection. Recital 6 defines it as the combination of sex with any other ground of discrimination referred to in Article 21 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union — race, ethnic origin, disability, sexual orientation, religion, socioeconomic status, among others. Recital 71 translates this abstract category into concrete subjectivities: women with disabilities, undocumented migrants, asylum seekers, LGBTIQ+ persons, women in detention, homeless women, older women, women living in poverty. Victims of violence are plural subjects, with overlapping and multiplying identities that produce profoundly different exposures to risk. At the operational level, Article 16(4) requires that individual assessments of protection needs take into account any intersectional discrimination experienced by the victim; Article 33(1) provides that support services must have sufficient capacity for this category; Article 36 requires that training for practitioners include specific competencies in recognising the needs of intersectionally discriminated victims. The term "intersectionality", developed by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in the late 1980s and already discussed in a previous focus in this series drawing on the United Nations practical guide, thus finds for the first time application in binding European law on the protection of victims of violence.
This attention to the plurality of victims responds to a documented reality. According to Eurostat 2024 data, 26.2% of the female population in the European Union has a disability, and women with disabilities experience disproportionate rates of violence compared to women without disabilities, with specific barriers in accessing support services and reporting mechanisms. Migrant women face additional risks. The European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) acknowledges that migrant women — particularly those who are forcibly displaced, in an irregular situation, or facing intersecting forms of discrimination — are more exposed to gender-based violence, while noting that available data at European level remain limited. As an illustration, a study published in the Lancet Regional Health in 2023 found that asylum-seeking women in France experience rape eighteen times more frequently than the general female population. The accumulation of vulnerability factors generates qualitatively different exposures to risk, which the law has historically struggled to recognise.
It is precisely on this ground that the most significant criticisms of the Directive converge, from two distinct but related fronts. The European Disability Forum (EDF) published in May 2025 a practical guide to transposition specifically aimed at ensuring that women with disabilities are fully included in national implementing legislation. The document identifies structural gaps in the text: forced sterilisation is not explicitly criminalised; the definition of rape is not based on the principle of active consent — "only yes means yes" — with particularly serious consequences for women with disabilities who may face barriers in expressing consent; national data collection systems are not required to disaggregate violence statistics by disability status, rendering this violence effectively invisible. Also crucial is the absence of organisations of persons with disabilities from the decision-making processes of transposition: without their participation, the needs of women with disabilities risk remaining formally recognised but substantively ignored.
On the front of undocumented migrant women, the critique is equally clear and has a precise history. According to documentation by the Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants (PICUM), an international network of 155 organisations across 34 countries promoting recognition of the human rights of undocumented migrants, the original European Commission proposal included an article explicitly prohibiting the sharing of victims' personal data — including residence status — between police and immigration authorities. This provision was removed during interinstitutional negotiations. The final version of the Directive merely invites Member States not to discourage reporting, without guaranteeing that information provided by the victim cannot be used by immigration authorities to initiate expulsion proceedings. PICUM summarised the contradiction by asking who would ever report violence and abuse if they risked being detained and deported rather than receiving support and protection. This is not a hypothetical scenario: an investigation conducted by Amnesty International France in 2025, based on testimonies gathered from eighteen victim support organisations, documents how undocumented women who went to police stations to report sexual violence received expulsion orders or were placed in detention centres. A joint statement signed by thirteen European civil society organisations — including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, ILGA-Europe and La Strada International — condemned the removal of these protections as a choice that once again silenced women affected by EU migration policies.
Directive 2024/1385 represents a historic step in the formal recognition of the plurality of victims. But formal recognition is not sufficient if the most vulnerable categories remain excluded from the very mechanisms designed to protect them — through gaps in the text, transposition processes that ignore them, or structural contradictions that the law has yet to resolve. Less than a year separates Member States from the deadline. The question that civil society organisations are raising with growing urgency is whether that deadline will produce laws capable of truly protecting all women, or only those the system is already equipped to recognise.
(Focus by Oriana Binik)
Main sources:
G. Traversi, Transposing the EU Directive on Combating Violence Against Women. Advocacy Guidance for Organisations of Persons with Disabilities (OPDs) and Allies, European Disability Forum, May 2025.
PICUM, New EU Directive on Violence Against Women leaves out migrant women, February 2024.
Amnesty International France, Rentrez chez vous, ça va passer, June 2025.