The conditions in which we are born, grow up, live, work and age affect ours salute, the risk of getting sick and life expectancy. The inequitable, and avoidable, variability of such conditions in different social groups determines health inequalities. Being female doesn’t help. It is a fact that women’s biological health advantage often ends up being canceled out by the i disadvantageunfair access of women to goods and opportunities. Gender paradox! Thus women live longer than men but in old age they have a worse quality of life and health due to a greater prevalence of disabling pathologies and a more precarious psychological state. Health inequalities they are not only a question of gender and biology, but also depend on the system of relationships between men and women and on the cultural contexts that create and feed it.
Not intervening to prevent avoidable inequality from causing damage to the health of a human being, and in this case to that of women, is a form of violence. Extreme forms of physical or sexual violence against women are more evident and make the news more often, so much so that one is led to consider them a sort of outlier, a one-off bloody phenomenon.
Violence, on the other hand, is a continuum. Begins with beliefs e prejudiceswith blaming the victims themselves of the violence because in miniskirt o tallwith patriarchal cultures, with the devaluation of women and children, with the body shaming and with misogyny. It “normalizes” through the acceptance of ridiculous epithets, social exclusion, stigma and the dehumanization of naked bodies used as a tray for sushi or covered in chocolate to refine the dessert buffet. It concludes with the physicality of groping, sexual coercion, rape and feminicide. And the idea of a continuum does not at all mean that some actions are more or less serious than others: subjective experiences cannot be quantified. It is violent to accept that working women have an increased risk of myocardial infarction because male children, by culture, contribute less to domestic work which therefore falls on mothers, overloading them; physical or sexual violence against women is violent which, in addition to the dramatic and immediate physical and psychological damage, exposes them to the risk of developing a series of secondary disorders such as depression, anxiety and panic attacks, eating disorders, addictions, sexual disorders and gynecological, sexually transmitted diseases, gastrointestinal and cardiovascular disorders.
Violence against women is a global public health crisis, a human rights violation of vast proportions that requires a major and decisive pre-emptive response and renewed political attention and action. The administrators have the task of bridging the interregional gap in the presence of counseling services in the area and of defending the principle of proximity to the community: it is also from family counseling offices that women’s empowerment and recognition and contrast to forms of violence pass. And we are all called to choose: behave like Athena, nurturing cultural models that punish the wonderful and innocent Medusa guilty only of having been violated by Poseidon, or take action like Perseus, definitively cutting off the head of the monster of violence. The ISTAT data of 2014 speak clearly to the point of making the probability very high that in the 31% of women who have suffered physical or sexual violence between the ages of 16 and 70 there could be someone close to us, as partners or former partners responsible for 13% of these cases.
Now is the time to act because change in results comes from changing culture. And we can and, therefore, must all contribute to this in a choral way with firm, courageous and, at times, even uncomfortable actions. It is useless to look for theories to explain it otherwise: violence is intentional behavior. It is an act of war aimed at striking and humiliating. It’s not a fit or a loss of control. There is an urgent need to recover a kind culture that re-founds itself on respect and that re-educates feelings by interrupting the socio-cultural and intergenerational transmission of violence and the traumas connected to it. It’s no longer time for the Go back and keep your face closed; / for if the Gorgón shows himself and you see him, / it would be nothing to ever go back up. Violence is not confined to Parco Verde, everyone lives there. And the eviction of him begins from this awareness.
Emanuele Caroppo – Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst SPI – Mental Health Department Rome 2
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Emanuel Caroppo
2023-09-04 09:58:51
#Continuing #violence #women #global #public #health #crisis #Riformista
