Beautiful Noises and Deafening Silences on feminicides and beyond
Femicide, slave trafficking, drugs. Sensitivity to social causes is contradictory. Battista Falconi's comment
Hundreds of thousands invade the streets, at least according to the not always reliable calculation of some newspapers, which for several days now have been filling their pages with the same theme, feminicide. The same is done by websites, social networks, television talk shows and news broadcasts, and radios. La Stampa of Turin (is it still?) headlined “What a beautiful noise”. Finally, belatedly, after Giulia's brutal murder, consciences have collectively and transversally awakened. And we can all say together "Never again", "Enough!": expressions that we know are deceptive, illusory, self-deceiving, since we will never completely defeat this social plague, like any other. Deaths at work or deaths on the road, wars, violence are an ineliminable part of human history, but certainly not for this reason we must stop fighting to eradicate them, resigning ourselves is not right, it is not possible.
In the face of so much outcry, its sudden and unexpected character is striking. The Me Too and Non una di meno mobilizations date back many years now (2006 and 2016, respectively), but why is it only now, only for Giulia, that participation is so massive and unanimous? It will remain a mystery, because media and social processes, as some scholars also say, are not actually predictable, they can only be analyzed a posteriori. But it is also and above all striking, in the face of this noise, the silence that continues to obscure other no less dramatic problems or, even, some aspects of this, violence against women. For example, there are those who fight in silence and concealment, partly voluntary and necessary, like Don Aldo Buonaiuto of the Giovanni XXIII community, successor of Don Oreste Benzi, who takes care of women, girls, often unfortunately little girls who are victims of trafficking. An activity of great delicacy, confidentiality and danger: the mafias that manage this trafficking around the world are particularly violent and the victims often bear terrible signs, physical and psychological, of the oppression to which they were subjected.
Don Aldo, to counter this phenomenon, calls for a law that sanctions those who make use of sexual services, in order to make customers jointly responsible and discourage demand. It is called the "Nordic model" because states such as Sweden and Norway, which we usually define as "advanced", have adopted it. Alfredo Mantovano, the undersecretary of the Prime Minister's Office, went to visit him yesterday. A low profile meeting, which however brought the government's commitment to Fabriano. The same commitment that – to talk about other serious, painful and forgotten problems – is trying to implement against drugs: also, speaking of noise, with an advert in which a boy tells another slightly older boy that he should get joints is dangerous and that you can move from so-called soft drugs to hard ones.
A naturally naive, simple commercial, if we want simplistic, as these messages compressed into a few seconds must be, but which says something objectively true. Naturally there is no automatic relationship between cane and other substances, but those who depend on the more dangerous ones almost always started with hashish and marijuana. Except that saying it is not trendy, it is not trendy, it is not mainstream and therefore anyone who tries to do so is mocked, ridiculed, as happened after the public communication campaign was broadcast. Then perhaps one day consciences will suddenly and unexpectedly awaken to yet another boy or girl killed, committed suicide, died (or cause of death) from a road accident or even simply survived like a vegetable, like a waste on the margins of society, in Rogoredo forest, in the abandoned premises of one of the many Caivanos in Italy.
Then, as happened now with Giulia's death, we will decide to change, to make a turn, to take another path, that of solidarity. Which, when it's not just in words, is however a tiring road, which climbs uphill, easy to get tired. Maybe one day it will happen.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/bei-rumori-e-silenzi-assordanti-su-femminicidi/ on Sun, 26 Nov 2023 09:10:29 +0000.