Below is the email circulated to the Observatory staff on 7 April 2025 by the group “DEIA@OAB non solo panchine”
Dear all,
As probably everyone knows by now, last week the femicides of Sara Campanella and Ilaria Sula were committed.
Sara and Ilaria are the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth women murdered because they are women in Italy since the beginning of the year.
In some Organizations, a minute of silence has been observed today in memory of Sara Campanella and Ilaria Sula. Every death deserves respect, but we believe that silence alone is not enough to ensure that Sara and Ilaria will be the last—not just after their deaths, but above all before such a tragedy can happen again.
For this reason, we propose a moment of reflection, using as a starting point the episode
“Femminicidi e Narrazioni” (“Femicides and Narratives”) from the podcast Cinque minuti (“Five Minutes”) by Teresa Cinque, which you can find here:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/5n5Az9sRIIqvWizN1OfSwm?si=Rbm-lIsTSLq9bBwC1dMFtQ
It lasts about 7 minutes, with a few additional minutes of context.
Below, we share a few quotes from the episode, fully aware they are provocative, in the hope of encouraging everyone to reflect.
“We need to learn to talk about femicides for what they are: crimes, extremely violent ones, against a specific gender.”
“Femicides are committed by men, or boys, and should therefore be their problem. Yet they are addressed, in the overwhelming majority of cases, only by women—mainly due to obvious reasons of concern and fear. […] It’s clear that avoidance and escape are the most common strategies among the male population, just as it’s evident that the killing of women at the hands of men has more to do with men’s problems with themselves than with the specific women involved, who become—as patriarchal culture teaches—tools for self-assertion or obstacles to self-assertion.”
“So men, boys, all males need to take responsibility for these difficulties, gather in circles, and begin to look at themselves. From sexist and homophobic jokes all the way to violent acts, there is an entire universe of behaviors not only to dismantle, but above all to question—to go and see who is the person underneath who wants to be heard. […] They should do that thing that is so important in any culture and society, and even more so in this historical moment, in this society: work on themselves.”
#civogliamovive
Sara E. Motta, M. Cristina Baglio, Maria Grazia Bernardini, Stella Boula, Pat Romano, Om Sharan Salafia, Tullia Sbarrato, Boris Sbarufatti, Stefano Vercellone, Anna Wolter, Maria Rosa Panzera, Emilio Molinari
