Where does violence against Italian women come from?

ROME--Giordana di Stefano was 20 years old, had a child and, like many other women in Italy, she went to the police to denounce her former live-in boyfriend and future murderer, Antonio Luca Priolo. Giordana was killed at the beginning of this week in the Province of Catania in the Italian region of Sicily, the latest in a rash of scores of murders of women that authorities evidently are powerless to halt. In Italy, as elsewhere, this violence shapes the relationships between men and women in many different ways. From the worst homicides, to the subtler and less obvious expressions of violence. It is a violence that arises from the gender base. The analysis of forensic reveils that the young mother was hit more than 30 times with a knife, some of them in the back. 

 How harmful are these expressions of gender violence in Italy? There are no official data regarding the number of murdered women in Italy.

 There isn’t an official organization or institution coming from the government who collects the cases. The most accurate info comes from the meticulous and hard work of researchers from Unione delle Donne in Italia (UDI), who gather cases collected on the daily news. Therefore, the data is considered to be definitely failing because not all feminicides are reported in the news.

 According to Vittoria Tola, member of UDI, the reason why there is no systematic collection of data, is because then it's easier to evade the problem and not to confront it from the national institutions. The problem is structural, systemic, and has to be addressed from all sectors of society, including the schools, the police, the judiciary.

 Because before the murders, violence against women in Italy occurs in previous steps: attitudes, behaviors and daily habits that undermine the integrity of women. Situations that many women face every day, sometimes unaware of the challenge that they suppose, and others, assuming as normal patterns of behavior accepted and widespread in all the sectors of the Italian society. Either in English or Italian there is a word to describe this pattern of behavior, defined in Spanish by the psychologist Luis Bonino as "micromachismos". The “micromachismos” are behaviors that not necessarily come from the intention of harming women; they are mental and physical devices integrated in the process of “becoming a male” and “being a man”. They are ways of behave in the society, of reasserting to the world, of relating to the environment within the structure of the patriarchal society.

 This type of violence affects all women no matter nationality, social class, education, race or age. The strong and active mobilization of the non-governmental organizations gives hope that Italy moves towards a general awareness in the society. Behaviors like senator’s Lucio Barani, who mimed an act of oral sex to senator Barbara Lezzi, don’t lead us to be optimistic regarding a coming change on the basic behaviour structure.