ROME — Martina Carbonaro, a 14-year-old girl, was murdered in Afragola, near Naples, on May 26, 2025. Her ex-boyfriend, 18-year-old Alessio Tucci, has confessed to the femicide, admitting he killed her and hid her body near an abandoned building after she ended their relationship, reportedly because of his violent behavior. Tucci had even joined the search with Martina’s family, trying to deflect suspicion. He has now been arrested for aggravated murder and concealment of a corpse.
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Among the many reasons why Martina Carbonaro’s femicide has shaken us, one stands out: the unbearable dissonance between what happened and Martina’s age. Between what the life a fourteen-year-old is, or should be, and how hers ended.
We tend to think of feminicide as something that happens to adults. Because at its core, it is always about control and possession. And in our collective imagination, adolescence is the opposite of control: it’s about rebellion, impulsiveness, uncertainty. That’s what biology intended. The prefrontal cortex, which governs rational thinking, decision-making, and self-regulation, only fully matures around the age of 25.
A generation more under control than ever
And yet we very well know that no generation has ever been more controlled than this one. We have apps to track their school grades, their absences, the sites they’ve visited — both real and virtual. Even the last time they logged onto WhatsApp. At the heart of all this is an ancient fear: the desperate need to know our children are still alive.
We’ve handed over to technology the most naive illusion of all — the belief that human life can be managed.
Because the problem of control does not just belong to adults.
But the lives of others always slip through our fingers. We can never fully grasp their inner world. Believing we can is a dangerous mistake, and adolescence is the age when that illusion becomes most intense and most lethal.
Because the problem of control — which is always, it’s worth repeating, at the root of femicide — does not just belong to adults. It’s something that, more than ever before, affects children too.
For Gen Z, sharing their real-time location with friends feels natural. It’s how they connect, how they feel safe. In fact, 70% of girls say geolocation helps them feel protected. The logic has been flipped: control isn’t seen as invasive or threatening. It’s seen as comforting.
21% of teens say that sharing passwords to social media with their partner is a sign of love.
According to a Save the Children survey called Le ragazze stanno bene? Indagine sulla violenza di genere onlife in adolescenza (“Are Girls Okay? Survey on Onlife Gender Violence in Adolescence”), 21% of teens say that sharing passwords to social media and devices with their partner is a sign of love.
Erasure of personal boundaries
One in five young people, in other words, believes that real love means total erasure of personal boundaries. It means knowing — and therefore possessing — every last detail of another person. The line between care and control gets lost in the sea of connection, which, for today’s teens, might be the most important value of all.
To “connect” doesn’t just mean to interact. It means building a relationship, forming a bond. It means getting access to more and more parts of someone else’s life. Becoming a part of them, fully aware of it. In another, not unrelated, meaning, to “connect” is also to reason, to think logically. So if someone believes, rationally, that another person is theirs to dominate, how do they cope with losing them?
We tell ourselves that the problem of patriarchal control belongs to the past: the husband who locks his wife in the house, won’t let her see her friends, or raises his hands on her. But those things are very much of the present.
Martina’s death is not random or inexplicable. It is the outcome of a system that runs deep.
And now they’re more dangerous because they’re more subtle. They’re harder to spot, and more insidious. Like before, they are accepted and normalized by society. But unlike before, they have now spread among the youngest. Especially among the youngest.
So Martina’s death, horrifying as it is — and it absolutely is —, is not random or inexplicable. It is the outcome of a system that runs deep. A system that has stayed consistent for centuries — even millennia. A system that turns jealousy into a virtue.
That keeps distorting a basic truth: the craving for control may indeed be tied to many emotions: insecurity, fear, low self-esteem, panic. But never to love.
