ENG_He was a good person

Emanuele Corn

Leandro Malgesini

Ivan Pezzotta

He was a good person

Insights into male violence against women

Preface by Gloriana Rangone

Preface

The most appropriate word to describe the beautiful book by Corn, Malgesini and Pezzotta is ‘complexity’. Not only do the authors provide valuable insights for those who want to approach the disturbing shadow surrounding the abuse of which women are so often the victims, but they do much more: they lead the reader through a wide territory, without knowledge of which this phenomenon is destined to remain unexplained or, worse, to be simplistically dismissed. It was a fit... who would have ever thought it? He was a good person...

The different viewpoints that the authors propose help us overcome the assumption of extraneousness to this theme that we often risk using and that makes us feel the problem as other from us. «I would never raise a hand to anyone, especially if it’s someone I love...» is a sentence that we often hear uttered with absolute sincerity. But just as often we hear «Some slaps have never hurt anyone» especially regarding the education of children. We may not agree with the statement, but it does not seem so serious to us, and we let things go. Or we hear screams, cries, clatter of broken objects coming from the adjacent apartment, and we think that they are our neighbors, and we tend to normalise. Even if we do not exercise violence, it is possible that we remain passive in the face of statements and even facts that have to do with it. So, the first reflection concerns the role that we can play fa-

cing the phenomenon of violence, a phenomenon that is not only often hidden but, even when it is evident, is normalized or otherwise underestimated. Think about how assisted violence, often present when violence against women occurs in contexts where there are children, is underestimated and still believe, despite there is clear evidence to the contrary, that if the children are not the direct object of violence or are not present on the scene, they will have no consequences in their development. Another expression of violence that is seriously underestimated is that occurring in the first romantic relationships between adolescents, teen dating violence, that recalls domestic violence (of which it represents a risk factor for the aggressor that for the victim) as it happens in a context of relationship that should be characterized by confidence, respect, harmony. It is often a matter of psychological violence (impositions on dress code, acquaintances, physical appearance, etc.), but there can also be physical and sexual abuse, aggravated by the possibility of spreading images on the Internet. Well, even this phenomenon is often underestimated by adults, who believe this to be a normal adolescent manifestation or (something happening frequently within the school context) that talking about it is likely to worsen the situation.

The story of Elisa and Giacomo, with whom I have recently interacted, is a painful example. They are two 17-year-old students who attend a secondary school. They start a romantic relationship, that after a few months goes into crisis because of the bullying attitudes of the boy, which forces Elisa to go out with him alone, to dress in a certain way, to always stay connected when they are not together. Giacomo, only child of a couple who has always been very committed on the professional level and little attentive to the needs of his son, grew up pretty much alone and the relationship with Elisa represents his only experience of emotional closeness.

However, the boy’s behavior leads Elisa to want to end the relationship, but Giacomo does not surrender: he can not give the only beautiful thing in his life up. The boy’s suicide threats induce Elisa not to interrupt the relationship altogether but one day, faced with a stronger stance than the others, Giacomo commits a serious abuse that even involves hospitalization because of the injuries suffered by the girl.

What particularly struck me in this case was the state of solitude in which this tragic event took place. Both teens lived in a family, attended a school context including adult figures and companions... But it seems that no one had detected the problem or, if the situation had been seen, the seriousness of it has not been grasped, the danger has not been noticed.

This story could be articulated further but I want to emphasize here that none of us is unconnected with the issue of violence and that what we do or don’t do can validate the idea that violence is a way to solve problems.

Another theme on which the book helps us to meditate is that of gender stereotypes, which perhaps really touches us closely in an even more evident way than the theme of violence. It is not easy not to fall into the trap of different colors for males and females, suitable games for one and the other, the features that are the object of praise depending on the gender. And if for a girl it can be difficult to follow certain expectations («I wanted a crane and they gave me a doll»), the same goes for males, for whom it will not be easy to deviate from an identity that privileges strength, competition, the ability to often impose oneself by any means.

We must recognize that, no matter how much has changed, it is not easy for adolescents to build a cohesive and integrated identity, centred on a solid self-esteem based on the belief that it has a value apart from beauty, from the ability to seduce or, vice versa, from the strength and the ability to

lead. In this regard, there is great work to be done to support adults in the difficult task of being supportive of the growth of children, who need to be protected but also left free to explore, depending on their skills, guided but also listened to and esteemed. Surely it may not be easy for parents to be authoritative but not authoritarian, not to fall into the trap of threats and punishments that inevitably push the other to validate a negative identity that can appear as an easy shortcut («better bad than nothing...»). It is also important to become sensitive to all forms of violence and to be able to detect it. Remember that behind the disturbing behaviors of children and young people and, sometimes, even behind diagnoses that describe provocative behaviors, situations of abuse can be hidden, on which it is important to intervene as early as possible.

If we shift our attention to the perpetrators of violence, we must certainly assume that, in addition to participating in a social context such as the one described, which risks not seeing or normalising violence and fostering gender stereotypes, have grown up in families characterized by adverse experiences, which have undermined their ability to build themselves as safe individuals, worthy of love and care. We must also assume that no one intercepted their suffering during childhood or adolescence and that the violence they exercised, far from being an incomprehensible act, is the consequence of a series of risk factors without protection.

The book also aims at getting us to the core of the treatment methods for these delicate situations, emphasising the importance of building a path together with the interlocutor, which is always a priority when, as is often the case, access to the service is not entirely spontaneous and therefore work on motivation and alliance is a conditio sine qua non.

If we move beyond the logic of the ‘monster’, whom we just have to lock up in jail and throw away the key, and see the abuser as the outcome of social and domestic factors that have not worked, perspectives for intervention open up, something that is not easy but must be the result of in-depth training. This does not mean, of course, that every situation is recoverable... I want to emphasise an important aspect here, affecting the effectiveness of all treatments, which is that of the relationship established between the operator and the perpetrator of violence: sometimes we have to painfully observe that it is the first relationship in which the other felt worthy of being respected and validated. And this leads us to reflect on how our emotions as operators interfacing with these difficult situations must be treated with great care and attention as a fundamental element for a successful treatment.

I would also like to stress the importance of publicising the services that are dedicated to the perpetrators of violence, also with the aim of reaching that group of young men who have not yet abused but have been about to do so, or have abused very marginally, who have understood that they are in danger and want to ask for help. The experience of the service that has recently started at our center 1 and of which I am supervisor has, from this point of view, also denied my expectations. I was rather sceptical about the possibility of receiving spontaneous requests for help. But it was a prejudice. Requests for intervention also come in this way, allowing to work in terms of prevention and early intervention with really interesting prospects of effectiveness.

Many useful stimuli therefore come from this volume and support us to work at different levels, in the belief that only a broad and «systemic» vision of the problem of violence, including victims and aggressors but also the responsibilities

of all civil society, can lead us to truly important and lasting changes.

Gloriana Rangone

Co-director of the IRIS School of Psychotherapy

Teaching and Research Individual and Systems

CTA Clinical and Educational Sector Manager

Adolescence Therapy Centre, Milan

Pablo

Who is Pablo Neruda? Pablo Neruda is a Chilean poet. This is not just an obvious fact, but it is the most synthetic definition he would probably have given of himself.

This famous man, who died in 1973 shortly after the coup d’état in Chile, told us in a profound way his life as a poet aware of his condition since he was a boy through a memoir, published posthumously in 1974.

It’s called: I confess that I lived. As he himself writes, it is a collection of discontinuous memories that sometimes get lost «because that’s exactly how life is». Again: «The memories of a poet are a gallery of ghosts shaken by the fire and shadow of his time».

As for them, a psychologist and a sociologist might tell us that all that book is a selection of fragments in which he thanks his many friends and loves for their closeness, but at the same time tries his best to ‘dismantle’ the aura of myth that had surrounded him, making him one of the most famous poets of the 20th century worldwide.

The short prologue concludes as follows: ‘From what I have left written in these pages there will always fall off - as on the trees in autumn and as at harvest time - the yellow leaves that go die and the grapes that will live again in the wine that is sacred’.

We begin this book by picking one of these leaves, or rather, a bunch of grapes that in the bottle, however, has

spoilt, leaving our palate as men of 2023 with a taste of vinegar.

The sour glass is a short passage, just a handful of lines long, which a lawyer would not hesitate to call (referring to the title of the book) a confession in all respects. The passage is this:

One morning, fully committed, I grabbed her by the wrist and looked her face to face. There was no language in which I could speak to her. She let herself be led by me without a smile and was suddenly naked on my bed. Her slender waist, her full hips, the overflowing breast cup, made her identical to the millenary sculptures of South India. This was the meeting of a man and a statue. She kept her eyes open the whole time, impassive. She was right to despise me. The experience never happened again (Neruda, 2016, p. 130).

Around eleven years after the narrated episode, demonstrating indomitable determination, Neruda was able to set up a ship, the Winnipeg, which brought 2,200 Spanish refugees fleeing a lost civil war from Bordeaux to Chile. Without him many would have died, and he spent his fame, power and the money he had to give them a homeland. The episode is so great that the murals in Valparaiso, where the ship arrived after crossing two oceans, still recall it.

Neruda can accompany us, analysing his case, precisely because he was not only an extraordinary artist (he won the Nobel Prize in 1971 ‘for a poem that by the action of an elemental force brings alive the destiny and dreams of the continent’), but because he was undoubtedly close to the cause of the weaks of his time, being forced to flee several times as a political persecuted.

In other words, only factiousness could diminish his credits..

Hence, then, we can talk more calmly and discuss his demerits and in particular that episode, how he narrates it, how (and by whom) it is read again today and how so many aspects make it so contemporary, even though it happened almost a hundred years ago.

The context

The passage we have quoted is too short for us to really form an opinion and make a judgement on the episode.

Some elements clarifying the context are indispensable because violence is not an intrinsic attribute of certain behaviours. To give an extreme but clear example: even an injection of morphine that causes a person’s death may not be a violent act if it is carried out by a doctor on a person who is experiencing severe pain from an oncological disease in its last stages, according to a legal protocol of palliative care.

If even causing a person’s death is not always murder, neither can it be said that having sexual intercourse with another person is always rape. Quite the opposite! The vast majority of sexual relationships are life-enriching encounters for the people who engage in them, but it is precisely the interpersonal context of space and time in which they occur that provides us with the elements to understand and determine whether a minority of them should be called sexual violence.

Without those elements, facts are merely facts.

Pablo Neruda writing the passage we have read is a mature, almost elderly man (considering the life expectancy of Chileans at the time) and narrates an episode of his youth. More than forty years have gone by and, precisely because he has thought about it for so long, we must be careful in

making judgements because, for better or for worse, many fragments of that event may have been altered in memory

Neruda at the time, in 1928, although he considered himself a poet since he was a boy and has already published an important collection, certainly does not live on literature. What he manages to earn from books, for the moment, is enough for a couple of dinners held to celebrate his publications with friends.

The described episode took place in a village not far from Colombo, the most important city on the island of Ceylon, south of India (still a colony of the British Empire), when Neruda was there to serve as consul. A few years earlier, thanks to a friendship at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he had managed to obtain a job in Southeast Asia, which, on the one hand, had isolated him from his background of relations, but on the other hand guaranteed him a small income to support himself. The Chilean government had diplomatic representations there because, even though not a single tea plant grows on its territory, there is no Chilean of any social status who does not drink as many cups of tea every day as an Italian drinks coffee. The Neruda of the episode is, therefore, a young 24-year-old with high hopes who lives on the island that would become Sri Lanka, under British government and laws, earning a living by signing documents and sealing crates and crates of tea leaves to be shipped to his country.

Who was the woman? Neruda does not give her name because he does not know. Following the habit of the time for westerners in India and South-East Asia, no matter how modest the accommodation (Neruda lived in a small house that was barely more than a hut), ensuring cleanliness, tidiness and supplies was a boy, a local guy who, despite working hard, could not and should not interact with westerners. That region of the world, since before colonialism, maintained a rigid

caste system that in the eyes of an Italian today would make one think more of the Middle Ages than the 20th century.

The girl who co-starred in the story was of Tamil ethnicity and of the pariah caste, the lowest of the social rungs, which made her a kind of non-person, educated from birth to have social interactions with other members of her own group only. As a pariah she was, therefore, well beneath the boy, and entered Neruda’s little house at dawn, through the side entrance, just to pick up the metal container in which the toilet waste was collected, place it on her head, go and empty it and put it back. Neruda noticed her (and how it was possible for the toilet to be emptied) only because by chance one morning he woke up particularly early one morning.

From that moment on, Neruda, fascinated by the beauty of the girl, narrates that he tried several times to interact with her but - as he writes - “she belonged to another life, to a separate world” and behaved with him, as with every other non-pariah, as if he did not exist.

Consequences

The consequences of this sexual intercourse on the girl can only be guessed from that passage, because there are no direct references anywhere else in the book.

In psychological language that has only recently come into use, we could say that probably, faced with Neruda’s aggression, she had a freezing reaction: fear prevented her from practising active behaviour, such as trying to free herself, screaming or running away, and literally froze her, bringing her into a dissociative state between her mind and body. This had the ‘disadvantage’ of allowing Neruda to carry out what he desired on her body, but it had the ‘advantage’ of giving her an experience of total estrangement, as if she had

been (and in a sense was) completely out of herself while he vented his desire.

Certainly, as he writes, this resulted in the aggressor having an unpleasant experience and not stimulating him to repeat the experience.

The estrangement typical of freezing helps the victim create a kind of emotional shell to protect him/herself from the trauma. The reason we make this statement is that the emotional reactions that lead us to engage in reflexive behaviour (such as the reaction to this sudden and unexpected aggression) are triggered by the deepest and ‘oldest’ part of our brain, the part that regulates vital functions. Facing aggression of a stronger enemy, freezing oneself by feigning death is a life-saving strategy used by many living beings.

There is no doubt, however, that what happened left heavy psychophysical consequences on her.

Neruda tells us that the episode was by no means repeated, from which we deduce, in the overall drafting form of the book, that the girl did not interrupt her work and continued to visit the house, bringing the situation externally back to normal.

The name of things

Did Neruda commit rape? We have not said so, not much to offer literary suggestions, but because what has been written so far was essential so that the answer to the question would not sound too ‘lawyerish’.

If this same fact were to happen today, in Italy (where we are publishing this book), in Sri Lanka (the country where the city in which the incident took place is the capital today), or in Chile (the author’s homeland) the answer would be, everywhere, the same: certainly yes. In all three countries

this would not only be a crime but would be punished with imprisonment.

A hundred years ago, however, things were not like that, and the answer would have been a triple no.

One of the most widespread (well-founded?) clichés about lawyers says that a good professional never answers yes or no to a question, because the right answer is always: it depends.

In this case, however, there are no doubts, and the hypothetical lawyer in Colombo to whom the young Neruda would have gone to ask for an opinion, in the grip of remorse, would surely have given him this negative response, accompanying him on his way out with a comforting hand on his shoulder.

Between then and now, women’s rights - and with them those of the entire human race - have made huge strides, but pointing this out by referring to that time - when even our grandparents were barely more than children - is essential to separate a judgement of legal responsibility (whether of guilt, acquittal or non-judgment) from an assessment of moral responsibility.

Neruda, who was the author, bears this event with him for his whole life. Let alone the victim!

It is a secret episode.

If not for his decision to make it public, no one would know him today. And we are certainly not saying this because this publicity is a merit, but only to realise that he really did consider it a burden that he did not want to take to the grave.

We do not know whether he succeeded, whether in describing this episode of his youth the leaf fell off the tree, fell to the ground and, turning to dust, flew away. What is certain is that Neruda, a man who lived his entire life surrounded by words, was unable to give this episode a name. This is no accident.

Naming things is that extraordinary operation that not only allows us to communicate facts and episodes: we can

actually use ‘other’ words to do this, turn around concepts, make periphrases or paraphrases. Giving a name to things allows us to see them and to see us in relation to that thing.

So, how often happens that the criminal lawyer or the worker at the anti-violence centre accompanies a woman along a soul path to the point of helping her to finally see herself? She did not have the strength to do so until then because the energy was needed to defend herself and let the next day come, but suddenly she sees herself. She realises that she is a victim and says so. In that moment she cries, and almost always those we saw working with them were not angry tears, but a moment, unrepeatable, of pity for herself.

How many other times, after so many encounters, so many dialogues and so many words finally exchanged with other men, with a specialised centre operator accompanying him into inner spaces he had locked or forgotten he had inside, does it happen that he sees himself? It takes courage to see one’s wounded body, and to see one’s soul and what there is inside can take even more, and it does not matter if those wounds were made by someone else or you made them yourself. It is the very moment when he is able to say what he himself has done, ending the sentence with a full stop and not with a ‘but’. “I hit her and humiliated her”. Full stop. And after that full stop he cries; those are the tears of loneliness and shame.

The power

In order for Neruda’s story to accompany us usefully throughout the next few pages, it is essential to be aware of the bonds of power that link the protagonists of the story and the unnamed characters.

We do not see the electricity, but thanks to that invisible power all our more or less technological objects work. Similarly, the power that regulates all of our interpersonal relationships (really those of all of us) is almost always invisible: nowadays, even kings and queens do not always walk around with crowns on their heads!

“Seeing” power, or rather, using power as a key to understanding relationships, helps to gain a deeper insight into the world in which we live.

Here, then, Pablo Neruda is (still) neither the powerful poet who travelled the world and whom, at the end of his life, not even the bloodthirsty regime of the Pinochet dictatorship allowed itself to publicly assassinate, as it had done to other literary figures and to the legitimate president himself, Salvador Allende, nor just any ordinary clerk, as his counterpart in Sri Lanka would perhaps be today.

Pablo Neruda, a young consul in the 1920s in Colombo, did not have the power to raise a few pesos the modest salary he received, nor to change his diplomatic headquarters to work in more interesting places on the island of tea. He was the youngest and most inexperienced on the diplomatic scale: the least powerful. In the social context of the Indian subcontinent, with its thousand-year tradition of caste, to which the rules of the British Empire had overlapped with mutual adaptations, he certainly could not be rich, but he had power.

Firstly, he had it in the street, as a westerner. Note, it was not a condition he had chosen, and it was not even a condition he could give up. As he gradually tried to build some social connection with local people, Neruda ended up being opposed by other Westerners on the island and still did not get much in the way of knowledge: even in other passages of the book, recalling the years in Ceylon, He proposes the experience of a solitary existence in which

he composed «my bitterest poetry surrounded by heavenly nature»..

Secondly, he had it as a man. No young woman could have carried out that diplomatic task, far from complex, neither in Colombo nor elsewhere. Of course, if she had been a woman, she would not even have been able to leave Chile without the permission of her husband or father, let alone manage her own (lacking) assets.

Thirdly, Neruda’s power is expressed as the master of the house, with all that entails.

What does this mean?

This explains why our famous protagonist did not even feel the doubt that his action could compromise, at the time of the facts, his public life.

The woman, as a pariah and as a woman (!), had no power.

She had no authority to turn to. Society did not offer any answers to her needs; rather, the only thing she could aspire to, to eat at least once a day, was to empty those of others in a gutter.

The power that regulates relationships between men and women in much of the world has changed rapidly over the last hundred years. It has not changed everywhere in the same way or with the same speed, but it is difficult to imagine a country in which today there is no longer the balance between men and women as there once was.

Given this slow but positive global change taking place, we will propose a point of view both internal and external to man, to understand the origin, intensity and direction of violence against women. We believe it is a way to enjoy the cool breeze of a new wind and, with the power that knowledge gives to each and every one, to raise the sails and to be carried away.

2.

The man

A woman, I no longer remember who, asked a friend why men feel threatened by women. He replied that they are afraid of being mocked by them. When he asked a group of women why they felt threatened by men, they said: ‘We are afraid they will kill us’.

The Fall, Season 2, Episode 6, 2014

The Unseen

Male violence against women, often against their partners or ex-partners, is a widespread and very present phenomenon within Italian society and beyond. The first movements that brought this problem to public attention so as to start looking for solutions were traditionally formed exclusively by women; perhaps it is also for this reason that gender-based violence is perceived by ordinary men (and women) as a female problem. This is also evident in awareness-raising campaigns aimed at citizenship: during public meetings, often organised on the 25th of November (International Day for Elimination of Violence Against Women), the audience is usually predominantly female. Violence is seen as something that does not belong to us ‘non-violent males’, to us who would never lay a finger on another person, let alone our partner, the woman we love and with whom we share our daily life. It is a problem of those few women who, through misfortune or naivety, end up in the clutches of some monster, perhaps sick or alcoholic.

However, as the story of Pablo Neruda opening this book teaches us, reality is not so simple and linear. We men owe a great debt to those women who have begun to problematise the phenomenon of gender-based violence: their gaze,

their analysis, has allowed us to question ourselves and open a path that - we hope - will lead to an improvement in the masculine world as a whole.

Considering gender-based violence as a women’s issue is, indeed, wrong, but sadly common. Like any social construct, be it superficial or erroneous, it has knock-on effects on our society and our way of living within relationships. Perhaps the most obvious effect of such a construct can be seen in the iconography of gender-based violence: if we look at advertisements, pictures, posters and billboards hanging at bus stops in the days leading up to November 25, we will find in front of us photographs of alone, frightened women, hiding in a corner or with their hands outstretched to say NO, to say STOP to violence (figure 2.1).

However, the man is not present in these images. Sometimes a dark shadow is glimpsed, sometimes a clenched fist (Figure 2.2). Sometimes he is even represented with a weapon or an object of torture and coercion. The man who acts violence does not exist in the iconography of violence, but this does not mean that he is not there: he is simply invisible. The public and shared view of the phenomenon of male violence against women places the responsibility for saving oneself on the victim, exempting the man from the responsibility to change.

The

in the counte-

Fig. 2.1 Stock image against gender-based violence, ©iStockphoto. com/masiandelight.

Fig. 2.2 Stock image against gender-based violence, ©iStockphoto.com/ funky-data.

invisibility of man and his responsibility in the debate on gender-based violence can also be seen

racting actions taken by governments and institutions. In Italy there is an excellent and irreplaceable telephone counselling service (1522) for women who are victims of violence. There are also anti-violence centres, shelters, counselling and support services. These structures and services are present in varying percentages throughout the country and should certainly be strengthened and made even more effective.

Formal and informal support networks for women experiencing violence operate in our society. These networks are interconnected, multifaceted and functional. They save and have saved many lives, have enabled many women to emancipate themselves from a man on whom they felt dependent, have prevented feminicides and other violent acts and provided support to mothers in distress. Their work is irreplaceable and probably insufficient to cover all the existing needs. In 2018, around twenty million euros were spent by the Italian government to finance the protection network for women who have suffered violence (mainly anti-violence centres and shelters). All of this is without taking into account the money that individual regions and provinces spent, as well as the indirect cost in terms of public health and the use of personal services.

The perpetrator of violence, however, is not involved in this huge (and necessary) investment of money and energy. Only recently have Italian institutions been moving to finance pathways and centres for abusive men, aimed at the assumption of responsibility and at stopping such behaviour. The man remains invisible, sometimes just a shadow in the background. His presence is sanctioned by the bruises on the woman’s body, the fear in her eyes, the distress of her children, the calls for help. He is there but cannot be seen. When he does show himself through his most serious actions, he is labelled as ‘crazy’, ‘criminal’ or most frequent-

ly both. The only possible solution for the woman and for society is therefore to arrest him, give him an appropriate sentence and eventually throw away the cell key.

The public cost of preventing man’s violent acts at any level is negligible, almost insignificant on public expenditure. The man who acts out violently only uses public money when he goes to prison and has to be fed and supervised, after leaving a trail of pain behind him. Programmes for perpetrators of violence, which are required by the Istanbul Convention that Italy ratified in 2013 (see box 2.1), are still scarcely present on our territory, although their number is growing. Men may continue to be invisible for now, and gender-based violence continue to be a women’s problem. With all due respect to males.

box 2.1

The Istanbul Convention

The ‘Istanbul Convention’ refers to the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and fighting violence against women and domestic violence, approved in 2011 by the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe. The treaty has been signed by 45 countries and was ratified by Italy in 2013. “The Istanbul Convention [...] is a manifesto, defining a vision of society in which women are not subordinate to men and gender equality is fully achieved’ (The Istanbul Convention on Violence Against Women: achievements and challenges, PACE Report, 8 June 2019, Doc. 14908, §12). The Convention is the result of 20 years of work by the Council of Europe to stem the phenomenon of gender-based violence and aims to provide global standards for this purpose. It is therefore a legal framework to which signatory states are obliged to adhere. It contains preventive, protective and prosecution measures for perpetrators. Among the various preventive measures, the Convention requires:

• to promote changes in attitudes and behaviour that justify violence against women;

• to raise public awareness so that it recognises gender-based violence in all its forms, wherever it occurs, and denounce it;

• to include in school programmes at all levels of education teaching materials on equality in order to teach children mutual respect in relationships;

• to train all professionals working with victims in the prevention and detection of violence;

• to develop treatment programmes for perpetrators of domestic violence and sexual offences to teach them to respect women and adopt non-violent behaviour.

(The Istanbul Convention - A powerful instrument to end gender-based violence. Council of Europe, 2019).

However, in order to stop this wave of violence, which leads to the death of 2-3 women a week in Italy alone, it is necessary to escape from the rigid schemes we are used to (woman victim - man monster) and to have a more open and broader view of the phenomenon.

The ultimate goal is to be able to intervene on the problem more comprehensively and effectively, finally ensuring the safety of all women.

Even though there is a common thread - not so subtlelinking the various types of violence, in this book we will deal with violence within emotional relationships. The question many people often ask themselves each time a new feminicide is announced is: How is it possible for a man to kill the woman he says he loves, the mother of his children?

To answer this question it is necessary to ask another, more useful one: What happens in the mind and body of a man when he assaults his partner?

Men act violence for different reasons, but in general we can say that the violence acted by men on women represents an instrument. This tool is used in order to maintain power and control over another person because this is necessary for one’s identity structure, self-image and sense of security. Man’s use of such an instrument has also been widely legitimised by history and to some extent still is. It is in fact authorised within many cultural realities (perhaps within most areas of the planet) and is still tolerated, when not favoured, within caring relationships (violence on children as an educational method).

In order to answer the proposed question, therefore, we must not start from anger but from another emotion, seemingly distant but intimately connected to the expression of violence: fear.

Patriarchy

We can define patriarchy as a social system characterised by the institutionalised dominance of men over women as well as over all that is considered ‘feminine’, which creates a situation of structural inequality based on belonging to a particular biological sex.

This system was built on two pillars: power as an instrument of domination and social hierarchy, in which men have primary power and predominate in roles of political leadership, moral authority, social privilege and control of property.

The establishment of patriarchal systems in most societies has had several consequences: the first is the functional division between genders, which has led to the assignment of specific roles and duties to men and women; the second is the acceptance of violence as a tool to maintain dominance, which has led to the normalisation of gender-based violence and discrimination against women; the third has been the creation of a patriarchal ideology that acts to explain and justify this dominance by attributing it to the biological differences between men and women.

4. Education

Over the years, various institutions have had the social function of accompanying citizens in their growth. The main ones have been the family, religions and, in more recent times, educational institutions. Education does not only focus on skills and knowledge, but also refers to our behaviour, our identity and our way of being men and women.

TWe therefore historically find a strong separation between what was free access for men and what was free access for women. Although the distance between the one and the other has narrowed in recent years, traditionally there was an educational space on the public side for men and a private one for women. It was up to the education system to define what remained confined to the private space and what shaped the public life of societies.

In the educational field, the transmission of the patriarchal system occurs in at least three ways..

The first concerns patriarchal discourses within the school. The history of heroes and the main protagonists of discoveries and inventions are always represented by male figures, who are proposed as a source of inspiration by the teaching staff and by the school institution. Even in textbooks for teaching Italian language to foreigners, authors such as Simona Frabotta (2019) have noticed the existence of a sexist over-representation in the images and contents.5 It has been observed that in the images of textbooks there is a high probability of the association of roles, activities and professions according to the more classical stereotypes seen above.

The second way has to do with the teachers’ own gender biases and stereotypes, their ideology, the hierarchy within the patriarchal system. In this modality, through daily in-

teraction and their narratives, educational authorities approve or correct the behaviour of pupils under their care, through verbal communication, cultural constructs and the discipline of the body. For instance, Italian males are systematically provided with implicit stimuli and social validity to develop skills that in the future will lead them to choose faculties related to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Openpolis, 2019). They are also encouraged to excel in highly competitive sports.

The third mode is that of education as a political process: a way in which education is one of the components of patriarchal socialisation where key ideological positions such as inequality, diversity, hierarchical relationships and injustice are transmitted. This third way constitutes the transmission belt of the system, together with upbringing and primary socialisation at home. This can be verified by observing how school programmes and subjects that are taught change according to historical periods in each country.

Intervening on educational tools is crucial in order to achieve social change, since it is the only tool that can be modified in the individual life history of each person. These changes can have a strong impact on the future and on the meaning that is given to the other instruments of the system.

For example, despite having had negative educational models (at school or in the family) in childhood, a young person may be blessed with positive ones during the later stages of his or her school career or life, and these may even lead to important changes in the way he or she interacts with others and with him or herself. This is undoubtedly the tool that enables, those who decide to intervene in this field, to support a significant change in a person’s life.

Why intervene with men?

Intervention with male perpetrators is a preventive procedure for subsequent violent episodes that is still uncommon in our territory. The ultimate goal must always be the safety of women, whether they are present, past or future partners.

Up to now, preventive activities have mainly been aimed at women, with an investment of resources and energy to ensure their safety and to find trained professionals to help them. In this regard, the work of anti-violence centres, shelters and the various associations operating in the area is irreplaceable.

This employment of resources, however, hardly involves the one who is actually responsible for these acts. The cessation of violent behaviour continues to be presented as a responsibility of the one who suffers it, in a kind of paradox that ends with the victim who, in order to protect herself, must also justify her behaviour and bear the economic and emotional consequences (see Chapter 5). The woman pays the cost and bears the responsibility of exposing to public what takes place in a private context.

This paradigm preserves the social conditions that lie behind violent behaviour, as the man is deprived of his responsibility until his acts are so serious that external agents (police, social services, Public Prosecutor’s Office...) intervene.

I realise now how wrong I was in my relationships.

I wish I had known certain things before, I had never thought about it.

Now I know that what I did with my wife is called violence.

Why don’t you talk about this in schools? It’s too late for us now.

If I had met you earlier maybe this wouldn’t have happened.

These are some of the statements that men who participate in groups for perpetrators of violence report in the final stages of the path or write in their logbook they share with participants in turn.

Intervening with men means paving the way for a change in the perception of the phenomenon. It means giving those who have done wrong the chance not to make the same mistakes in the future, but above all, it means being able to tell women that the problem of gender-based violence is first and foremost a male problem, which males must solve by taking responsibility for the consequences (including the legal ones) of their acts and by working on themselves so that it will never happen again.

One of the fundamental postulates of intervention with men stands that violent behaviour is the result of a choice and can, as such, be changed (see Chapter 2). The word ‘choice’ is in this case improperly and somewhat provocatively used. It is not an entirely conscious, planned, and rational decision. By ‘choice’ here is meant a series of factors, most of them unconscious, that result in the decision to act with a violent behaviour - often experienced as the only right and possible one - instead of implementing a more functional one.

Choosing differently requires great work on oneself: work that allows one to see behaviour and consequences from the outside, in all their rawness and depth.

Violence in relationships does not stem from an illness, it is not something that belongs only to a few exceptions, to a minority of men with mental problems or addiction to alcohol or other substances. It is something widespread in our society, but which can be addressed and solved. However, the focus must be on changing the social norm (see Chapter 4).

The first thoughts and programmes for male perpetrators of violence have only recently started towards the end of the last century, initially in North America and then in

Europe. A significant first step took place in 2004 in Strasbourg, where the conference The therapeutic treatment of male perpetrators of violence within the family was held, attended by representatives from various European countries, but not from Italy.

In our country, we had to wait until the 1980s and 1990s to see the first steps in this direction, but even then it was simply the rise of small groups of men trying to practice some sort of self-awareness (Bozzoli, Merelli and Ruggerini, 2017). The first of these groups was ‘Uomini in Cammino’, born in the early 1990s within the Basic Christian Community of Pinerolo, Piedmont. The community’s goal was (and still is) to give visibility to men who wanted to start a journey to get out of patriarchy. Following these proposals, ‘Il Cerchio degli Uomini’2 was born in the late 1990s and became an association in 2004. Apart from issues of male consciousness and awareness, the association began to address intervention with male perpetrators of violence.

In 2007, the Maschile Plurale association was founded in Rome, and included in its statutes the aim of committing itself ‘publicly and personally to the elimination of all forms of gender-based violence, both physical and psychological’.2

It is only in recent times, shortly before Italy’s ratification of the Istanbul Convention in 2013, that a number of paths for men responsible for violence against women began to emerge in Italy.

2 https://cerchiodegliuomini.org/

3 https://maschileplurale.it/

What you have read in this essay is nothing more than the story of a man as we authors wanted to represent him.

It is the story of an ordinary man, raised in a given family and within our society at this historical moment. This man is blond and brown, tall and short, strong and small, young but also old, comes from a wealthy but poor family, he is a professional and an unemployed. This man is everyone.

He is an individual of whom one day someone might say: «He was a good person».

In this historical moment in Italy (but not only) the man capable of acting violence against a woman does not have a precise profile.

Does this mean that all men are violent? If you have read the previous pages, you know it is not so.

It means, however, that even today the patriarchal system favors the use of violence as a tool to maintain power within emotional relationships. It means that, under certain personal and family conditions, every man can make his own, in a deep and pervasive way, certain male prototypical modes and under certain conditions he can act violence. It also means that, unlike what happened a few years ago, we now have an extra tool on our side: awareness.

Today we know that a man is not violent «by nature», but that everyone can become violent. We know that there are no monsters, and that violence must be eradicated from

the social models that maintain it and ensure that it can be transmitted from generation to generation. We know that the use of violence is the result of the personal history of the individual in relation to the sociocultural matrix to which he belongs.

Society is changing, as are institutions, even though they do so very slowly. The data we have set out are not comforting, even if glimmers of light allow us to have a cautious confidence in the future, knowing that with time things will improve.

We can cultivate a certain confidence in the long term: the laws for the protection of women will change, there will be more and more prevention programmes and there will be no need for «female quotas», because both genders will be represented in institutions. But when? The road, although marked, is not without obstacles, and we do not know how long it will take to travel it.

Any delay corresponds to suffering which could be avoided by more systematic and decisive political action. Spaces for improvement, so that everyone can enjoy the benefits of a life free from violence, are and must be occupied, inhabited and made to flourish.

The story told in this text does not end with the man’s violent actions, but also sees him involved in his confrontation with justice. We see this man enter prison, face a trial, discuss and confront his lawyer and attend a programme for men who commit violence.

We see this man change, although not without difficulty. We don’t really know how much has changed. We cannot understand how much weight the fear of justice played and how much listening did, how much the techniques learned were useful and how much the work on oneself was done by surgically opening his mind and his heart to observe his way of living emotional relationships.

However, we know that we have laid a stone to be able to divide a before from a later, we see that there are tools to manage one’s emotions that were not previously there and in this way it is possible to distinguish between anger and fear, between love and possession of the other.

For this social and cultural change to be truly pervasive, however, we need the help of many other people. We need more men who become aware and change the predominant male model together with others. Men who are not afraid to look wounded, fragile or in love. Men who show without shame the desire to care for each other, who know how to cuddle and hug their children, who ask for help when they are in difficulty. Quoting Pellai (2023), we can say that we need more authentic men and less real men.

We will not ask for the help of women here, not because we do not need it but because we believe that they have already done much more than what would have been legitimate to ask, by revealing the plot of the patriarchal system and making explicit what was implicit. It is not right to ask them to do something else, to help us further.

Today, it is up to us to be responsible for how we act. It is up to us to get off the pedestal on which we have been placed as males and collaborate in the creation of spaces of equality, fairness and respect.

The individual man is responsible for the violence he acts, all men have the responsibility to make the system change.

We need social, educational and health workers. It is necessary that they form on the topic, that they train their gaze to recognise the signs of violence, that they lose the atavistic fear of intervening in the spaces of the private and say to the man «you must change, you can do it and it is urgent that you do so».

Social professionals must be trained and must be aware of the limits of their intervention and training, asking for help from experienced colleagues, since violence is a complex issue that needs an equally complex and articulated preparation. Dozens and dozens of cases, some of which have come to the attention of the European Court of Human Rights, leave no room for doubt now about the institutional obligation of social services to provide, services to the citizenship adapted to the international obligations assumed by our country.

We need law enforcement and the court system, each for its own expertise, to do the same. The weaker part of society is paying on its own skin decades of minimisation that collide with denial, when patent aggressions end up being qualified as «skirmishes» or «marital disputes». These state officials must be able to recognise violence from the signals it sends out and must work in synergy with the other institutions, sending the violent man to the appropriate services.

AWe need universities, so that they increase the presence of courses on this subject, emphasise its depth and importance, and can create professionals and conscious professionals. Female and male students have an immense thirst for this knowledge, but the institution is too shy in this regard and grants it with the dropper.

We need justice, so that it gets rid of the stereotypes that have not yet abandoned it and, without any excess but without any fear, condemns, where it must, in accordance with the laws in force.

We need politics. Politics looking at citizenship and at the complexity of phenomena. Intervening by stigmatising the dynamics that maintain violence and not limiting to utilitarian victimhood or waving to public opinion idiocies such as chemical castration, or reams of paper crammed with

increases in penalties that clash with a reality of shameful impunity.

We need a politics that thinks, applies international conventions, and invests in social change. A politics that modifies the way violence is narrated, that removes women from the central role of the problem and puts man in his place. You have acted violence, you have a problem and you have to ask for help. You have to change, not her.

Campaigns to prevent violence against women must start talking about men. We need campaigns to prevent male violence in which man feels identified and recognises himself. It is necessary to create a narrative in which man can see himself in the mirror and realise that he is wrong, knowing at the same time where to ask for help. The new slogan could be: «Men, get help».

We know that what we are asking in these lines is not impossible. Humanity, at a certain historical moment, decided to want to get to the moon and, on a route traced by a woman, a man arrived. Building an Italy and a world free from male violence against women is an equally complex challenge but, as we said, the road is marked and we believe that it is worth taking it.