Discussion about violence against women in Italy

Working group discusses violence against women in Italy

Taken from www.eui.eu

Posted on Wednesday 12th December 2012

The response to violence against women in Italy varies depending on a victim or perpetrator’s nationality, a speaker at a Gender, Race and Sexuality Working Group said on 26 November. 

The event was held the day after the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, bringing academics and practitioners together to discuss the current situation in Italy.

Valeria Ribeiro Corossacz, an anthropology lecturer at the University of Modena, said that Italian society took a different approach to violence based on the person’s identity: “When the violence is committed by a man with a foreign background, the reason for the aggression is found in the culture, nationality and religion of the man…In the case in which the violence is perpetrated by an Italian man, there is a tendency to explain the action in a psychological dimension, as jealousy or an individual aspect which is not representative of the entire Italian or Catholic culture.”

Giving such justifications for violence dismisses the truth that aggression is grounded in social relationships based on gender inequality, she said. Going further, Ribeiro Corossacz argued that this allows for the “reproduction of respectable racism” in society. “[It] creates a cultural hierarchy based on the way men behave against women, as it fully legitimises the inferiority of whole cultures by arguing the superiority of white, Western culture,” she said. 

As men’s experience is determined by their identity, so too is that of women. Nicoletta Bacci from Artemisiaassociation, which has a refuge in Florence, said that while 70 per cent of women who phone for advice are Italian, 98 per cent of those who stay at the shelter are foreign.

“Italian women have much wider support networks of friends and relatives; many foreign women do not have this network. Moreover, they are often rejected by their communities if they do denounce violence,” she said. Launched in 1991, the association first worked with women from Eastern Europe although is now seeing an increasing number from Africa, Asia and South America.

The women’s diversity extends to their reason for coming to the refuge, Bacci said. While some may have come voluntarily to Italy, others have been trafficked.

Francesca Nicodemi, who works on trafficking for the Association for Legal Studies on Immigration (ASGI), said that while an effective legal system is in place in Italy, there are several problems of implementation.

“One example is that many police officers demand that the victims collaborate in the criminal proceedings, although this is not the law,” she said. “[Also], police authorities to not identify women as victims of trafficking; they simply classify them as irregular migrants and take them to a detention centre or send them back to their own country where they are without help.”

The European Commission describes Italy as being “at the forefront of the fight against trafficking in human beings and the protection of victims,” owing to its victim rights centred approach which grants people a residency permit for protection without requiring them to take part in the prosecution process.

However, Rashida Manjoo, the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women described “A fragmented legal and policy framework, as well as limited financial resources to address violence against women” after avisit to Italy in January 2012.

If Italian law was practiced to the letter, Nicodemi said the residency permit would allow women to integrate into society, going beyond the initial aim of ending violence. The greater challenge is to change attitudes within Italian society, said Ribeiro Corossacz: “Society has a sexist attitude and at the same time women who voice their descent are delegitimised and violence against women in all these forms is not acknowledged.”

In response to the current challenges, a cross-border project has been set up which aims to give migrant, refugee and ethnic minority women suffering from violence a greater voice in Europe. Franca Bimbi, a sociology lecturer at the University of Padua, spoke briefly about creating dialogue among women in Italy through training courses and mentors, a process which is replicated in Finland, the Netherlands and Spain as part of the Speak Out! Project. She was joined at the event by fellow University of Padua professor, Francesca Alice Vianello.

(Text by Rosie Scammell)