The first version of this book, in Italian, was published in 2005; the second version, in French, in 2006. The book had a positive reception in both countries and I had the pleasure of presenting it and discussing it publicly on many occasions. Since I have continued to take an interest in male violence against women and children in the meantime, as researcher, teacher and activist, I would like to use the occasion of the English edition to add some points for reflection that have arisen during these years.

The first concerns the use of language to talk about this violence, use that seems to be more and more problematic. Although historically it has been of crucial importance ‘to give a name to things’ – and therefore invent terms such as ‘domestic violence’, ‘femicide’ and ‘child sexual abuse’ – talking about violence today, even among activists, who share many theoretical and political assumptions, has become difficult. Part of the problem is connected with the internationalisation of the debate: some terms that are preferred in some languages, cultures and countries are not accepted elsewhere. Thus, when the English version was being prepared, I discovered that ‘incest’ is a term it is preferable to avoid in the UK and the concept of ‘domestic abuse’ may be preferred to ‘domestic violence’, because the first also includes psychological violence. On the other hand, in France the term ‘abuse’ is abhorred, because it is considered euphemistic with reference to the stronger term ‘violence’ and also because, if we take its Latin etymology literally, ‘abuse’ refers to excessive use in cases where even ‘use’ is unacceptable. In Mexico and Central America feminists have changed the English term ‘femicide’, which was originally coined by Jill Radford and Diane Russell (1992), into ‘feminicidio’ to oppose the discourse of the State, which puts ‘homicide’ and ‘femicide’ on an equal footing (Lagarde, 2005).

On the one hand, these differentiations are a positive sign of the liveliness of the debate on violence against women; on the other hand, they appear as an echo of the more general postmodernist fragmentation of the social world and entail the risk of becoming lost in linguistic nuances and no longer finding common language or strategies.

The linguistic question naturally returns to a conceptual question. The debate on the term ‘victim’ is exemplary in this sense, but also worrying.