National Demonstration against violence on women
Rome, 24 November

We will be taking part in the 24 November demonstration against violence on women as this is something that concerns not just women, even though it is women, of whatever sexual orientation, who need to defend themselves from it.

They have to defend themselves from it when they are subjected to it, they have to defend themselves from it when it is used against them in order to restrict everyone’s freedom.

It is true that violence against women is something that crosses class borders, but it reproduces a mechanism of imposition and dominion that is the cornerstone of exploitation.

There are the victims that hit the front pages of the papers, shamelessly used to hide the absence of social policies for support, of housing policies, the dismantling of public and social services, the political world’s refusal to govern society by any other means than brute force, the tensions caused by increasing impoverishment, and the surrender of so many parts of civil society to the warmth and familiarity of tradition. Then there are the second-class victims who die within the walls of their normal family homes, homes they were maybe trying to escape from. The ones who are not the victims of some madman who can be used as a scapegoat or of someone from another culture that can easily be blamed. Because it is within the much-celebrated family that the weakest members of society have to bear the brunt of the fear of creating equal, freely-chosen and freely-managed relationships, relationships that would undermine this patriarchal, hierarchical and authoritarian society that we know so well and struggle to survive in.

Then there are the unmentioned victims of exploitation, bought and sold for a few euro, bought for their flesh or for their labour, slaves without voices and rights, locked away in warehouses or exposed to the elements on the highway. Every act of violence against these women increases the violence against all women.

But violence against women cannot be defeated by new, increasingly ineffective, laws nor by night-time vigilante groups or increased police patrols. It can only be defeated by freedom, by greater personal autonomy. And the road to personal autonomy passes through the struggle for better pay, for pay equality between the sexes and for social services, by solidarity between women and by individual and collective growth and betterment for women and men, so that they will be able to go beyond the cultural impositions of the holy trinity of Church (which proposes), Market (which disposes) and State (which imposes).