VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN

We often hear on television about victims of femicide attacks in the home, at the workplace, or even in front of their children, but what does the term femicide mean. It is a criminological term introduced for the first time by the feminist criminologist Diana Russell in a 1992 article to indicate the killing of women by men for being women. It is therefore the voluntary murder of a woman for reasons related to her gender that has the specific purpose of exercising a physical or psychological subjection on her. This type of violence is a violation of human rights that crosses all cultures, classes, ethnicities, and age groups. This term has had a very strong use in recent years precisely because of the growing number of female victims of murder for cultural reasons to remind all this violence was established a World Day against Violence against Women, 25 November each year.

In Italy every three days, a woman is killed by a husband, a boyfriend, a partner, or a former partner. The question arises: why does a man get to kill his partner, the mother of his children? How can a man who has loved go so far? However banal, the simplest and also the most effective answer is that on the one hand there is the strong insecurity, the fear of loss and abandonment on the part of a man who does not struggle to define weak, on the other, there is impotence, the bewilderment, the submission of a woman who cannot find the courage to rebel.

If I think of violence so brutal as to arrive at a real crime, I think of a woman who has dreamed of love and who finds herself suffering humiliation and pain within the walls of her home, in familiar places where she should instead feel protected. I guess you might think you can get out on your own, but I don’t think that’s possible. Today, fortunately, there are psychological support centers for women who have been abused, who have been denounced, and who have been saved from a terrible fate. I suppose you must feel hurt, bewildered, but this should in no way have the upper hand. And yet there are many women who suffer at the hands of those who said they loved them and this surprises me enough, to the point of leaving me almost incredulous.

As a woman, I try to put myself in the shoes of a man who takes refuge in violence, in the existence of pain and anger, but I really cannot admit that one person thinks he owns another, that he cannot think that the woman can live and breathe even without his presence.