Where does the social scourge of violence against women and feminicides come from?
Let's not call raptus or madness the too frequent episodes of violence against women, which often end tragically in femicides, because it is rather a lucid and delusional criminal design. The intervention of Francesco Provinciali, former MIUR inspection manager and judge on. Milan Juvenile Court
The news tells us stories of minors and women victims of violence: they are transversal stories, which do not have predefined social targets, which do not exclude the contexts of life that are more natural for them, which unfortunately become a trend and custom, almost a correlate of other drifts emergent negatives in human behaviors. An escalation that engulfs the weakest and most defenseless part of existence, as if to signify that there is no limit to the worst, that aggression, ferocity, inhumanity, malice are consumed with increasing ease and delirium, until they become a social scourge and decline of individual values.
Alternate in a sequential and symmetrical way, these crimes against minors and women, in the collective imagination are almost a narrative ritual of the brutality to which humanity can reach, at every latitude, as if centuries and centuries hadn't been enough of a condition of inferiority and instrumental submission, as if what we define as civilization as an acquired and shared value weren't something decisive, a full stop in the name of human dignity and respect.
Minors overwhelmed by the wave of violence are talked about and kept silent with shameful nonchalance.
To those who write these lines the experience gained in the juvenile court has reserved and still reserves – to the scent of the echoes of the news – anguish and amazement because reality surpasses the most fervent and murky imagination.
For too long the condition of women has been living in a similar condition of succumbing. One month from the end of this 2022, there are 104 feminicides in Italy, 88 of which occurred within the home. An almost obvious ritual at the hands of husbands, companions, cohabitants who often do not accept a separation but even before that they do not conceive and cannot bear that the woman has self-love, the freedom to interrupt an often violent bond, made up of denigration, abuse, submission existential marginalization. Anyone who approaches this theme with intellectual honesty finds millenary, ancient, rooted tendencies in it: mythology itself has given us cultural archetypes – that is, ideas, representations, figures – of the woman as the embodiment of corporeity, of temptation, of fragility and of danger , of succumbing to male violence as an expression of the original, native condition from which he is unable to free himself.
History picks up the threads because it has always been like this, even if today paradoxically strengthened macho disvalues are added to the ancient legacies, such as the possession of the body and the soul, the breaking of inhibitions, the shame hidden by silence, the woman as a source of pleasure for himself and of sin where it is not the exclusive property of the partner.
Let's not call raptus or madness what can be ascribed to a lucid and delirious criminal design, to the biological structure of the individual, to the environmental context: a theme that plumbs the most heinous crimes and which I am deepening in a long dialogue-interview with Professor Vittorino Andreoli, someone who tries to trace the origins of evil: "if you want to understand violence, you must first know what fear is".
An apparently paradoxical answer that opens up deep questions and enlightening explanations.
Personally, I am amazed by two aspects of the prevaricating behavior of men over women: the escalation of the criminal project which removes all inhibitory brakes until it reaches the physical annihilation of the victim. I wonder if the social and criminological narrative of similar facts is not enough to stop the murderous hand: it seems that any clarifying dialogue is preventively expunged in order to reach the final irreversible outcome. Secondly, I am struck by the sense of impunity and ease, almost the ostentation of security to get away with it by those who know that murder is a way of no return.
This is why women must report at the first hint of danger: it must also be said that the protection of institutions does not always work and that justice is often delayed and posthumous.
Too many balloons released into the sky, too much applause at the funerals of the victims and too many silent and posthumous torchlight processions mask society's inability to prevent criminal acts.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/da-dove-nasce-la-piaga-sociale-della-violenza-sulle-donne-e-dei-femminicidi/ on Fri, 25 Nov 2022 10:33:16 +0000.