Women lead governments, families, businesses, research, women go into space, win, overcome obstacles without ever complaining. Yet women are also victims of the immutability of time. Victims of a violence that has the borders of the globe as its walls and is becoming more implacable every day. Violence does not always present itself in terms that can be legally prosecuted, however, the Italian Society of Historians stresses, such attitudes must be condemned by society. Today, November 25, 2018, the human race is in a long cord of solidarity and shouts “enough. It is not acceptable that this aberration has not yet been overcome, eradicated. Institutions like ours, first and foremost the government, have a duty to work urgently on this scourge caused by a masculine, misogynistic vertigo, which betrays a series of cultural, moral, psychological limitations of a part of the male gender. There is no superiority in brute force, in disrespect, nor can history, with its many epitaphs, justify such a madness.
Instead, there must be a spur instead of the long and troubled process that led us all towards the first conquests. It was 1996 when Law 66 arrived, after almost twenty years, at the important result of the transfer of the rules on sexual violence from crimes against public morality to the section of crimes against the person. A fundamental step that contributed to the ousting of a cardinal principle of our system, held until 1956 on the jus corrigendi of the master father. It is necessary to give account of the facts, but above all it is fundamental that women appeal to their own strength to react to the abuse of power, to be aware that language also constitutes offence and that the sphere of morality cannot have a single weight and a single measure.
The 2011 Instambul Convention is already an important step forward, but not yet sufficiently resolute. The Diplomatic Institute will work as always to help wounded people, wounded women, to rise to dignity and a possible life far from insults and harassment. Violence, declared the philosopher Vittoria Franco, “is a reaction, the non-acceptance of the spaces of freedom and autonomy claimed by women. It is a violation of human rights that must be prevented through education, even in schools, to a new ethics of relationship. A work to be done, inevitably, in two”.
General Secretary, Dr. Valeria Rinaldi
