lunedì 26 gennaio 2009

Violence Against Women in Italy

In these days, italian media have been focused on many news about several cases of violence against women. The severity of these events, their quick succession, the kind of the proposals suggested by italian politicians to cope with these crimes and the negligent irony with which the italian prime minister has commented these facts ("we should have as many soldiers as the number of pretty girls...") push us to deeply think on the decency of italian society. I don't want to discuss neither these ironical words nor the related political controversies. If someone believes that increases in the number of soldiers and policemen in the streets can solve the problem, he is surely a day dreamer. Policemen and soldiers will always arrive too late when the crime has been already done...

As I have already said, these facts are surely dramatic and their severity may focus media and public opinion attention for a while. Unfortunately the everyday violence against women, happening in the home of workplace silence, very rarely catch our attention even if about these private facts we are often well informed (my nighbours, my colleagues, my friends, my relatives, ...). In these contexts (my dining room, my office, my bed room, ...) soldiers and policemen cannot enter...

It is important to state always and again that violence against women is a violation of a human right. This violence can get the most various shapes and forms (exclusion, lack of respect, incapability to see women as human beings, denigration, ecc...): unfortunately italian society under this point of view is particularly indecent. In too many contexts italian women suffer heavy forms of exclusion and violence (exclusion from politics, from job opportunities, etc.) because women in italy are considered "unable": being politically incapable, politics is a men's affaire, being incapable to be a CEO, this remains a men's domain. This condition condition results also in religion: Italy is a catholic society and in catholicism women has a secondary and passive role because they are "unable". They may be sadistic saints or a nobody: in the worst cases they are demonized because they may embody the absolute evil.

A culture which costantly remove our nature as "persons" will always generate an indecent society which humiliate its citizens, above all the weaker groups, making them "statistics", consumers or users.

The rapes at the core of these recent news are thus the most evident and final events of a long series of humiliations italian women are forced to suffer everyday within this indecent society and for which we all are responsible...

A description of this issue in Italy may be find in this report (in italian and in english) which provides a partial framework of the problem being based on a servey: the partiality of the issue is also the consequence of the fact that the victims, often for fear and prejudices, not always have the courage to accuse these criminals.

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