“Trama di Terre” (the name means “Weave of Lands”) was founded in Imola (province of Bologna, region of Emilia-Romagna, northern Italy) in the winter of 1997 by a group of Italian and foreign women. From the beginning, the guiding idea of the association has been to find a point of sharing between women coming from all over the world. The sharing point was neither gender only (because women are not all the same and not not everyone is ready to experience emancipation) nor just being migrants (because the meeting must take place even with the natives and because migrating initially breaks the person’s identity and makes them weaker).
In the struggle for access to material and symbolic resources, migrant women often face a dual vulnerability: on the one hand, the lack of citizenship means fewer rights and the constant risk of falling into irregularity; on the other hand, migrant women, as well as the natives, but sometimes in more extreme forms, are victims of roles that are assigned to them by the patriarchal mentality of their families and communities of origin: the good wife, the good mother, the good daughter – with all the violence that ensues when a woman decides to rebel.
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Male violence on women has no colour, no religion, no culture – it crosses all the patriarchal societies because it needs to maintain the power imbalance between men and women. But there are forms of violence which are imported with migration, and affect mainly migrant women, putting their lives and bodies at stake, when they are not in a position where they can enforce their own rights.
Dear Monica, Laura and MAREA,
we are a group of italian natives and migrants young women, ageing from 17 to 27 years old.
Feminism is a new subject for many of us, while some of us are feminist since years.
In between us, some became feminist also thanks to you, thanks to your writings and the words you shared with us during your visits at our schools in Imola.
We live in a city, or better in a country, where is difficult to find places where we can freely express ourself, discuss and listen openly to each others, talk about the problems and fears we face as young women of the 21st Century.
However, we managed to find one of these places. You know it well as you referred to it in your feminist magazine, i.e. the Intercultural Women Association Trama di Terre.
This place allow us to see theory put into practice, to experience the daily life of many women and sharing with them our emotions, experiences and feeling. We meet every week and we put in to practice the precious teachings you, adult feminists, have taught us, have left us in inheritance in order to change a society where we find less and less space for us.
With this spirit, the day of the 14th of February we decided to get involved organizing the international demonstration “One Billion Rising” in the city of Imola.
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In order to understand the seriousness of what happened on the 8th of March in Imola, we need to take a step back.
On February 14th 2015, during “One Billion Rising” (an international flash mob against violence against women) a group of girls read a statement expressing their willing to grow in a world that guarantees full freedom and self-determination rights to all women.
Among other things, they stated: “We ask to not underestimate, dismiss and criticized the word “feminicide”, because it refers to an existing phenomenon, although many people still deny it, and because a lot of people still consider women guilty when murdered and raped. We are thinking of the two kidnapped girls in Siria, Greta and Vanessa, as well as the disgraceful and shameful way they have been described. Luckily, they came back safe; but they have been described by the public opinion as irresponsibles for putting their life in danger to help a war-victim population. Would the reaction be the same, if they were men? Probably, they would have been welcomed as heros, as it has been the case of the two Marò, accused of the murder of some indian fishermen.”
One billion rising is the campaign created by Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues, to encourage more than one billion people to demonstrate, while dancing in all the most important squares of the world, for the right of every woman to live her own life without violence and fear. The demonstration is held the day of S. Valentine in order to give men the opportunity to perform real love and respect together with their partners. It is an alternative proposal to traditional flowers and chocolate. 207 countries are participating and, in each squares, women and men are dancing together for the revolution against a society that does not allow us to be the owner of our own body! The women experiencing violence are billions, but one billion of women dancing is a revolution!
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