Silence and noise

At the beginning of the new millennium, violence against women and children is no longer a secret, something that the victims have to hide, without hope and without means of release. We are more and more aware of the frequency and consequences of domestic violence, rape, harassment at work and child sexual abuse, phenomena for most of which there was not even a name until the 1970s. The women's movement produced awareness, knowledge and resistance; it revealed the web of complicity, often institutional, that allowed the individual violent man to continue to act, undisturbed and unpunished; it invented, proposed and at times imposed a series of measures to prevent violence. In industrialised countries and also in many developing countries there are antiviolence centres and refuges for maltreated women, almost always the result of work by feminist groups; new projects and protocols are under way; and the police and health and social workers are agreeing, and sometimes asking, to be trained in the subject of violence so that they can intervene with greater sensitivity, expertise and efficiency.

We have come a long way in the last 30 years. In many industrialised countries, there have been important changes on a legislative level. In Italy in 1981 ‘honour crime’, which drastically reduced the penalties of anyone killing his spouse, daughter or sister, if he considered that their sexual conduct had injured ‘his honour or the honour of the family’, was repealed. In many European countries the so-called conjugal exemption, according to which rape committed by a husband against his wife was not considered an offence, was repealed: in 1991 in Holland, in 1994 in the UK and in 1997 in Germany. In the last two decades of the 20th century, various international organisations and numerous governments drew up important declarations defining violence against women and children as an unacceptable violation of human rights, a source of tragic consequences not only for the victims but for the whole of society, and therefore an obstacle to development. The World Bank itself has emphasised the enormous economic cost this violence involves (Pickup, 2001).

Still there is no shortage of causes for concern. As we will see later, many of these achievements are proving to be fragile or contradictory.