💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › patrizia-the-violence-of-poverty.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 13:30:40. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-06-20)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: The Violence of Poverty Author: Patrizia Date: September 1989 Language: en Topics: feminist, Italy, patriarchy, rape culture, violence Source: Retrieved on September 1, 2009 from http://www.geocities.com/kk_abacus/ioaa/poverty.html Notes: from Insurrection, September 1989
Yet another rape. But today violence against a woman is more amusing if
it takes place in a group: of at least 14. This is what happened in a
village in Militello, Sicily. A fifteen year old girl was raped by boys
between 11 and 18 years old all looking for adventure. An adventure with
a girl whose parents had just returned to Sicily after years of
emigration.
The newspapers point out one particular: the girl, who became pregnant
as a result of the rape, was mentally disturbed. Her womanhood, her
freedom of choice, is trampled on before she starts. First by her
parents, who almost kept the fact hidden because of their shame, then
the whole village, who interpreted the event as a boyish prank to defend
the rapist kids, then the judge. The girl is being prevented from having
an abortion. The village priest shows off his sullen moralism.
This time they couldn’t even use the alibi of a miniskirt, of the
seductive gaze of the continental woman who — they say — attracts men
and distracts them from their good feelings of father, husband or
brother.
In that environment there is a more subtle violence, a violence that
comes from ignorance and fear. The ignorance of the boy rapists who
pursue images according to which a woman cannot be considered a human
being to be respected and loved.
In the south, as in the north, sex is still something dirty, composed of
violence and abuse. In Milan a girl is raped by a male nurse in a
hospital bed. In Termini station in Rome eighty people stand by and
watch as an attempted rape takes place on a station bench. The rapist
was then covered by the crowd and escaped. So, look out. From the tiny
Sicilian village to the huge metropolis, rape remains the alternative of
idiots, the last beach of interior marginalization and the incapacity to
communicate one’s rage in any other way.
But in a little village the authority of the priest, the judge, the
carabinieri, the public opinion of “respectable” people who don’t want
any scandal, bears a fundamental weight on things. In such an
environment it is even possible for abortion to be denied to a girl who
has been raped.
Violence is practically subscribed to by a power structure which itself
exercises a double violence on the population: on the girl who must
submit to the decisions made by the family and the rest of the village;
and on the boys.
They are all more concerned with obeying laws and morality than about
the life of this young woman.
We must begin to shout our rage again, but not by asking for more severe
laws or the application of new ones: this only helps the system to
castrate any possible search for freedom, our own and that of others,
men and women alike.
If we believe that the practice of rape is born from a precise social
condition, then we must not humiliate ourselves with demands for laws
that only play the game into the hands of those who rape and exploit us
daily.
We are not interested in whether those who raped the girl are found
guilty or innocent. That would be too easy. We must fight the whole
structure that contributes to creating the idea of violence against
women and against marginalized people and proletarians in general. And,
as usual, the latter, instead of beating up the bosses, are fighting
among themselves, numbing their minds with all the shit that power
produces. Violence often grows from conditions of poverty and survival
that create the need to possess at all costs what one cannot have
through practices of freedom, be it sex or any other part of normal
activity.
If we want to overcome this profound contradiction between the request
to be “regimented” and a search for liberation within human beings, then
we must struggle in our own way and with our own instruments against all
the relations of dominion that generate violence. Perhaps that day in
Militello the boys would have preferred to have beaten up a priest or to
have created some perspective for a less rotten life. Today they are
locked up in a cell and are asking themselves why. The state will pardon
their misdeed, but they will always remain convinced that all that, even
their very punishment, was right and fits into the normal way of things.