Italian jurisprudence[1] has taken a condemnatory attitude towards the ritual we have here defined as 'bride price'. The traditional exchange between the groom's father and the bride's father, objectivised and divorced from the marriage rite of which it is a part, seems superimposable on the description made in Article 600 of the penal code, which condemns 'anyone who exercises powers corresponding to the right of ownership over a person', without there being any need to assess the existence of further dysfunctional elements symptomatic of severe limitations on personal freedom.
Even recognising its cultural character and its potential protection under Article 2 of the Constitution as a cultural right, the bride price is always excluded from protection in the balancing act with other fundamental rights: considered in terms of typicality as a form of reification of the person, on the level of anti-juridicality it is considered devoid of the effectiveness of the offence, even if it is an inviolable right, because it damages fundamental goods for the individual.
The in-depth study proposed above offers an analysis of the rite of bride price from another point of view, the anthropological one, which brings out its symbolic value and its social functions.
The analysis of these elements, considered here in the abstract, could be used as a guide in the assessment of any concrete case and lead the judge out of the strictures of Article 600 of the Criminal Code through a consideration of typicality and offensiveness. In the absence of symptomatic elements of a situation of prevarication or abuse or of real human trafficking purposes, the conduct could be framed as a simple nuptial “gift."[2] In this case, the cultural connotation of the practice, ascertained in the concrete case, would lead out of the area of criminal relevance, not so much because the conduct is the expression of a cultural right and therefore endowed with a certain force of disqualification and prevalent in the balancing with other rights, but because it is not harmful. Indeed, it is the expression of values common to the majority culture: the freedom of the individual, in terms of choosing the rites by which to contract marriage, and the protection of the social value of the same.
The European Court of Human Rights seems to have moved in this direction, which in M and Others v. Italy and Bulgaria, 2012, explicitly declares the impossibility of identifying the ritual in question as a form of exercising powers typical of property over the person, but rather qualifies it as a simple exchange of gifts, like many others present in the matrimonial traditions of other cultures. Another element that is emphasised in this pronouncement is the young bride's consent to the ritual. While it is true that this element may not have particular relevance with respect to the unlawfulness of the act, it is nevertheless a useful argument to show how the rite is anchored to a shared cultural tradition, at the familial level, which is not in itself considered harmful to fundamental rights by the subjects directly involved in the rite.[3]

notes

[1] Corte assise di Napoli, sez. IV, 23/06/2015, no. 58; Cass. Pen.,, sez. V - 08/03/2019, no. 37315; Cass. Pen., sez. V - 13/05/2021, no. 30538.

[2] The use of the term 'gift' in the official text of the ruling of the Edu Court M and others v. Italy and Bulgaria, 2012 ('gift' in the English version), is not only a linguistic translation but an attempt at cultural translation of the practice in the judicial vulgate by judges and interpreters. From an anthropological point of view, indeed, rather than the term gift, the translation as 'reward' would have been appropriate.

[3] This is the path taken also in Criminal Cass. sez. I - 27/05/2019 no. 28282, where after several degrees of judgement it was decided not to consider the ritual of the bride price as a typical fact and to proceed instead in a hermeneutics that would take into consideration the legal values actually infringed in the case in point, namely public order and security, as regards the offence of unlawful introduction into the State. ​