How much is a woman’s dignity worth? The question is not rhetorical, but dramatically current. If you look at the Italian courts, the answer risks being discouraging: less than ten euros a day, that is, nothing.

This is what emerges from one judgment of the Court of Appeal of Palermo (n. 822/2025, photo below), recently published on uisjournal.com, which awarded compensation of just 12 thousand euros to a sales assistant who was harassed at work, in exchange for three years of degrading and offensive conduct.

As in the “Gennarino case”

The story recalls a famous precedent from 1971, the so-called “Gennarino case”in which the damage to a minor’s health was calculated – by the Court of Milan – on the basis of the salary he would have received as an adult, as the son of a worker. Then, as now, the income parameter is used – in this case to measure the suffering of the victim of harassment -, re-proposing a criterion that seems to belong to a class system rather than to a rule of law based on substantial equality.

In the Palermo case, the judges ascertained the existence of serious physical and verbal harassment, committed in a toxic and harmful work environment. The worker, initially reluctant to report for fear of losing her job, was recognized as the victim of a clear context of psychological submission. Despite this, the quantification of the damage was anchored to the worker’s salary: one fifth of the salary for each year of harassment. The result is paradoxical: in concrete terms, the moral suffering of a woman exposed daily to degrading, humiliating and offensive actions and words was estimated at less than ten euros per day.

We are faced with a protection which, instead of restoring dignity, risks inflicting a second wound, that of “secondary victimisation”.

The other “questionable” sentences

This is not an isolated case. In other recent rulings, women victims of serious harassment at work were awarded compensation of between 10 thousand euros (Court of Grosseto, 14 May 2024, no. 211) – equal to approximately 18.50 euros for each day of an ordeal that lasted eighteen months – and 25 thousand euros (Court of Massa, 11 August 2025, no. 215) – equivalent to 17 euros a day for over four years of harassing conduct. A “compensatory moderation” which empties the dissuasive function of European-derived anti-discrimination law (in particular Article 18 of Directive 2006/54/EC) of content, which imposes effective, proportionate and truly dissuasive compensation.

Harassed all over again, compensated with 9 euros – by Fabrizio Gatti

The problem, however, is not only jurisprudential or cultural, but also systemic. Today judges move in a regulatory vacuum, without reference parameters. Yet, a bill presented in the Senate in 2021 (DDL n.2358) implementing the Oil Convention n. 190 and still “remained in the drawer”, provided for the possibility of recognizing compensation for damage with also a sanctioning function, between 20 thousand and 200 thousand euros, which can be increased up to 400 thousand euros in the most serious cases.

How much is the dignity of a woman worth

In the absence of uniform legislative criteria, the evaluation of suffering therefore continues to depend on the equitable discretion of the individual judge who, as we have seen in the case decided by Court of Appeal of Palermoled to it being parameterized to the victim’s income. Thus, more than fifty years after the “Gennarino case”, the question still remains the same: how much is a woman’s dignity worth? The answer, unfortunately, has not changed.