On the occasion of a day, November 26 with the national procession in Rome against male violence against women and gender, organized by Non Una Di Meno, which sees many women, and some men, demonstrate the rebellion with "love and anger" to a dominion that continues to wage war against their bodies, perhaps it is not useless to draw attention to that "new kind of volunteering" which has seen the birth of the first centers since the 1980s
committed to giving victims of violence support, solidarity and the expertise they needed
.
How many anti-violence centers are there today in Italy, how many women who work there, often for free, how many funds are available for reception, legal cases, the costs of "shelters"?
Who talks about it?
Behind the feminicides, which arrive as news stories in the media - underlines the journalist and activist of the Feminist Movement since the 1970s Lea Melandri in an article on the Riformista relaunched by Comune Info - there is the underworld of physical and psychological violence that they prepare them and there is
the difficult and tiring work of those who have listened to so much suffering
, ambiguity, denunciations made with courage and then withdrawn.
Places always at risk of eviction - as in the case of Lucha y Siesta in Rome - or centers where the funds arrive with a dropper.
ANSA. it
Invisible, unheard, trapped, no more silences on violence against women - Lifestyle
(HANDLE)
In the book
At the center of words.
35 years of feminist practice
, the "Roberta Lanzino" anti-violence center in Cosenza has collected the testimonies of the operators and those of those who have started with them a path of
"recovering their own lives
".
They are voices that alternate respecting the choices of empathy, equality, absence of judgement, which have been the basis of their work.
Recognize conditioning
that prevent a woman from escaping the violence of a husband, a lover, a father, means not underestimating the contradictions of a domain that has perversely intertwined relationships of power and exploitation with intimate experiences, such as love, sexuality , motherhood, family affections.
It is in welcoming and listening to other women that the word can become the bearer of wounds and, at the same time, of the strength and courage that the protracted violence has made invisible". Paola Litrenta, one of the operators, writes: "The most sometimes we sit around a table: asymmetrical bodies and gazes. On one side the operators, on the other the women. Each with her own training, her own identity, her own history. And in the centre? In the centre, the words, stories.
At the center is the relationship (…) Words are dense, they have a specific weight.
They fill the space, welcomed and held back by the high walls of the rooms.
(…) The transaction is not so immediate, there are feelings, a sense of shame, anger, the desire for redemption, the need for protection.
Comparison changes them, it changes us too: it relativizes what troubles us in our daily lives”.
The analysis of sexist violence
and the practice with which feminism since the seventies has tried to bring it to consciousness, in all its forms, invisible and manifest - self-awareness, starting from oneself -
is the ground for a hitherto unknown radicalism that today unites different generations
,
associations, documentation centers, women's houses, anti-violence centers in the women's liberation movement.
The transversality of the patriarchy, the links that have always existed between different forms of oppression, to be seen in their ambiguous implications, need a language that knows how to penetrate intimate life and at the same time languages of public institutions.
"The anti-violence centers have a lot to say about this word taken away from sectoral knowledge and fueled by the relationship between women faced with the "war on their bodies" in the private and public spheres".
