This article will have a melancholy conclusion, the absence of an effective “medicine” to solve the problem: violence against women. It’s the day after, the day after the cloying world days against violence against women, which, waiting for the next day 2023, will begin to count the victims.
It is the day after of a distracted collective adhesion to this theme, like “oh yes, violence against women we are against”: this is the little attention to a theme, which deserves a little more.
This theme deserves more attention because, according to the data, one woman out of three in the world suffers any form of violence. So also in Italy. Now, if I wanted to become a champion of the campaign against violence against women, I would be guilty of false intentions. I am guilty, at least passive. In my personal history, born a man, I never gave a damn; maybe potentially able to commit violence against women, married, when I tried to make my macho culture prevail, I found a strong woman in my woman.
She put me in line and slowly educated me on gender equality. But always very passively and above all in the enclosure of the house. At the dawn of my sixty-plus years, the need to feel repentant, guilty, redeemed, but still a bit hypocritical, awoke in me. But ready to atone, in wanting to dedicate myself for the future with attention to the theme. How I don’t know, but I can come up with something. Meanwhile, as a lover of the web, I have tried to understand the dimensions of the phenomenon, first of all looking for insights on the subject.
There is a literature that puts shivers and knowledge on all of us, such as to make the theme known in its causes, in its dimensions, but above all in the lack to date of a common and coherent strategy for the solution, at least for the mitigation of the problem. In the first place, this is not an issue to be left to the good will of individuals or voluntary associations. The problem is, as usual, that of the fish that stinks: it stinks from the head. And the head is the indications that a conscious Government must give to its citizens. Starting from the punishments? No, it’s too easy, we can’t absolve the conscience of a violent person with punishments lasting a few months or years.
It’s a defeat. Let’s start with the family for an education in the language: a woman who makes mistakes is not a slut, or she makes mistakes because she is a woman. She makes mistakes, period. Then the Government puts its own, it must start by educating the little ones in kindergarten, in elementary schools, to begin to dismantle all the beliefs that differentiate males and females. Some of you will laugh, thinking I’m talking about the Middle Ages. No my friends, if I said earlier that one out of three women in Italy is a victim of violence, you will well imagine that school structures are still peppered with gender pathologies. The victory will be to begin to identify them, to work on the teachers to help them improve, to make them understand that a dicente can make a mistake in the subjunctive, but cannot tolerate that in classroom relationships and in break time games, girls still have the atavistic role of minority.
In every school, there must be committees for addressing and analysing these phenomena, capable of directing the teachers behaviour. Then the world of work: we talk a lot about management, organisation, personnel managers. Well, every company must have a certified, examined, qualified personnel function in dealing with the correct relationship and management of work and genres within the company. I regret never having shared the thought of those who see solutions in cultural and educational issues. But this subject of violence against women cannot have other solutions. Well yes, I also recognize that a possible solution is, albeit starting from very far away, a fact of education and culture. Hard work on them.
Which will then have to be followed by the issue of institutional attention points. Information gathering centers capable of being able, before punishing, to understand and try to direct what is still in its infancy can turn into something more serious. By acting on support for passive subjects, but above all on the reasons for the violent. Machismo? Jealousy? Frustrations of all kinds? Is it easier to blame close affections than with real causes of what triggers the violence? At the end, and only at the end, the denunciation machine. To date, a sensation: that she is colluding with the violent, if not as guilty as the violent. But how can we stand the fact that a complainant with a face swollen with fists, a few months after having denounced, is killed? How to believe in the good faith of government campaigns against violence against women? Enough with Governments killings! At the end I will hear your comments: how many obvious things and platitudes you make us listen to. Of course. But you don’t do either that.
