PROJECT ORIGIN

In 2021, UN Women publishes worldwide data on what it calls ‘the submerged pandemic’, i.e. the exponential increase (1 in 3 women) of domestic violence during isolation due to the COVID pandemic.

But gender-based violence is not submerged: the Viminale’s 2023 data are very clear. From January to August, 80% of female homicide victims were killed in the domestic sphere; of these, 61% at the hands of a partner or ex-partner.

The sexual violence increased by 11% from 2022, to the point where one in five women report having experienced sexual harassment; of these, 15% were victims of revenge porn. Of the total number of victims of domestic abuse, about 82% are women. It is not only husbands or partners who engage in violence: it is also fathers, uncles, older brothers, cousins, as the disturbing case of Saman Abbas in 2022 showed.

The epidemic of violence is therefore by no means submerged: what is submerged is the pandemic of emotional illiteracy that permits, justifies and conceals violence.
The culture of machismo, in fact, of women as the property of men, who control their attitudes, customs, especially sexual ones, finances and thinking, is an inextricable part of Mediterranean patriarchal systems, as shown already in the 1970s and 1980s by anthropologists and sociologists of the calibre of Pierre Bourdieu.
The control over women also reflects a control that men must exercise over themselves and over everything that might be associated with the feminine, with weakness: emotions, emotionality, affectivity.

Anger and shame are the only feelings allowed to the man: this to be avoided, and that impossible to control. In recent years, the conviction has become more and more firmly established among psychologists that only a profound cultural change can substantially reduce gender-based violence, and that the cultural change must come through emotional literacy: training in one’s emotions, in emotional management and regulation, in empathy and relationships.

“ERM” wants to offer this kind of training to young adults in the partner countries, in order to overcome not only cultural deficiencies, but also educational deficiencies, since, with the exception of experimental projects, emotional education is not provided in high schools and universities in any of the countries involved.