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I would like to acknowledge the support of the Irish Research Council, whose CARA/European Commission co-fund research fellowship scheme allowed me to carry out the research for this article.
On 26 December 1965 seventeen-year-old Franca Viola was abducted from her home in the town of Alcamo in western Sicily by a group of armed men led by her former fiancé, Filippo Melodia.1Both her mother and younger brother were at home with her and Franca was not abducted without a struggle. When she was bundled into the getaway car Viola's mother Vita Ferro was briefly dragged along with the vehicle and was left bleeding on the street. Franca's brother Mariano would not let go of her and was thus taken with her in the car, only to be returned to the outskirts of the village hours later. Franca herself was not found for a week, despite an immediate and extensive police search of the area. Her ordeal came to a dramatic end when police stormed the nearby home of Filippo Melodia's sister, where he had been hiding out with Viola. 2Melodia made one last desperate and defiant stand by attempting to flee onto the rooftops with Viola before he was taken into police custody.
The details of Franca Viola's abduction were at once both familiar and unusual to onlookers in 1960s Sicily. It was a somewhat recognised Sicilian practice to kidnap a young woman in order to force her into marriage. The logic of such kidnaps rested on the notion that a woman's honour was measured by her sexual chastity. Once her honour had been compromised by spending time alone with a man - although rape was common in such cases, sexual violence was considered of secondary importance to the loss of honour as a social value - she could only repair it through marriage to her abductor. 3Since the loss of honour affected not just the woman but also her family, parents and siblings would typically also be invested in securing the marriage. The concept of 'reparatory marriage' - in which the crime of rape could be absolved through marriage - was present in the Italian legal code until 1981. 4However, such practices were more prevalent in rural Calabria...