World day against violence against women
We need a ‘vaccine’ from childhood: after the feminicide of Giulia Cecchettin will there be a before and an after? ‘This time it is even more terrible’
That of Giulia Cecchettin, a 22-year-old biomedical engineering graduate, is the 105th feminicide in Italy since the beginning of the year and comes just a few days before the historic World Day Against Gender Violence. Giulia was barbarously killed at the hands of Filippo, her ex-boyfriend, also a young man, also a university student at the same faculty in Padua. It was an unhealthy story that the young woman had tried to interrupt by burdening herself too generously and illusorily with the pain that every separation causes in those who, as in the case of Filippo, did not accept ‘losing her’ and continued to want her all to themselves.
Behind the endemic scourge of gender violence there is always the idea that a woman belongs to a man, the illusion that she is responsible for a male’s failures, the lack of pity and empathy, narcissism, patriarchy, jealousy, possession: a tangle of unreasonable and often premeditated, lucid madness that breaks the lives of women of all ages … turning them into red benches that, like modern crosses, are now scattered all over our peninsula, from Sicily to Friuli.
Photo:www.labparlamento.it
Photo: www.cgilrimini.it
Photo: www.ilfriuli.it
Photo: www.palermotoday.it
BUT RED BENCHES ARE NOT ENOUGH
Giulia’s death has shocked the whole of Italy so much that her house, in a small town in Veneto, has become a place of civil pilgrimage. It is as if Giulia had become the daughter, the sister, the friend of each and every one of us, flowers arrive from all over Italy, even from entire families: ‘In front of the Cecchettin’s house, and even around the corner, and even down the ramp that leads to the garages, there is this thick barrier of flowers in cellophane, and little puppets attached to the gate, heart-shaped balloons that the wind blows here and there. And they no longer fit, in bunches now, amidst grieving madonnas, candles, phrases of true love: ‘Giulia you have entered the hearts of us all, rest in peace…’, and of commitment: ‘For you we will burn everything! Maybe we won’t change the world tomorrow, but we will keep on shouting…’, the collective signature is of a family, mum Cinzia, dad Massimiliano, Giorgia, Elisa, Irene… A quiet family from Veneto, the whole of them, who swear their commitment so that such a thing will never happen again”. (Source:www.repubblica.it)
Photo: www.repubblica.it
Photo: www.repubblica.it
FOR GIULIA
25 NOVEMBER DEMONSTRATIONS HAVE BEEN BROUGHT FORWARD
TIDES OF WOMEN IN THE SQUARE SHOUTING
“If they touch one of us, we will all respond”
Women, but not only women, no longer need benches or red shoes, but rather resources, framework laws and a real will to intervene in society to initiate a process of cultural transformation. We often hear that men today ‘are confused and frightened’ because of social changes that are too sudden, also the fault of a ‘feminism’ taken to the extreme, trivialisations that do not stand up: violence exercised through possession is not a fact of our times.
For too long women did not have the courage to make their voices heard. The pain and abuse were closed within the walls of the home with the connivance of a family, who did not want to see and give scandal. Now they express their anger with a ‘poetic cry’ ‘If I don’t come back tomorrow, burn everything’, was written in lipstick in Palermo by the girls of the Network of Middle Students. The walls of Naples translated it: ‘Appicciat’ t’ cos”. There is nothing different from the lucid, political, public message that beyond the private heartbreak launched by Elena Cecchettin, Giulia’s sister, the new sister of all: ‘Don’t do a minute’s silence, burn (symbolically) everything’. (Source: sfoglio.repubblica.it), Elena was the first to call for mobilisation, relaunching the last verses of a 2011 poem by Peruvian artist and activist Cristina Torres Cacères:
'If tomorrow is me, mama,
if I don't come back tomorrow, destroy everything.
If tomorrow it's my turn, I want to be the last one'
www.ansa.it
We of the Good Shepherd are there: we have been working for a long time to deconstruct, ‘destroy’ the culture of gender and domestic violence, to rebuild human relations on the basis of mutual respect between men and women, right from the cradle. We work to ensure that the Istanbul Convention – on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence, which our country ratified in 2013 – is no longer a dead letter, and that we teach, with words (written and oral) and by example, that love, with jealousy and possession, has nothing to do, and that no person belongs to us…as if they were a thing. We no longer want to wake up in the morning with the news that another woman has been slaughtered.
