This extraordinary woman is called Franca Viola, she is 78 years old today.
She was 17 on Boxing Day 1965, when her ex-boyfriend Filippo Melodia, a well-known criminal and nephew of a local clan leader, after a long series of threats and intimidation, broke into her home in Alcamo along with 13 armed youths, who trashed the apartment, beat her mother to a pulp, and kidnapped Franca and her little brother Mariano, who had clung to his sister's legs and would not let go.
They left her brother a few hours later. Franca didn't. Franca spent the next seven days locked away in a country cottage, and later at Melodia's sister's house. Finally, after a week spent mostly in bed, fasting, semi-conscious, insulted, robbed, and humiliated, she was raped by her ex-boyfriend.
When she was tracked down and released by the police on January 2nd, Melodia took it for granted that all charges would be dropped with what was then considered the norm: a “shotgun wedding”.
And it is here that a story tragically common to hundreds of women takes a turn that will change Franca's story and that of an entire country. Franca refuses to marry, choosing to declare herself "shameless" before a bigoted and appalled public opinion: something that had never happened before.
Franca has everything and everyone against her: the Italian state, the mafia, and a patriarchal and archaic society that considers her an accident. She has only one person by her side: her father Bernardo, who has never abandoned her from the first moment and has joined the trial as a civil plaintiff, even at the cost of his own work.
And it was during that historic trial that Franca Viola uttered these words, which still resonate so loudly today, but which back then, in 1960s Italy and Sicily, sounded simply blasphemous. And, for that reason, so powerful.
"I am no one's property," he said. "No one can force me to love someone I don't respect. Honor is lost by those who do certain things, not by those who suffer them."
After months of smearing, insults, threats, and intimidation of every kind, Melodia and her accomplices were sentenced to 11 years in prison. Franca won, married another man, and took back her life, but we had to wait another 15 years for shotgun marriages and honor killings—thanks also and above all to her courage and tenacity—to disappear from the penal code.
It was August 5, 1981, exactly 44 years ago.
Even today, more than half a century later, when Franca meets some of her tormentors on the street, they bow their heads at the sight of that woman, unable to bear her gaze, her unshakeable dignity.
As we talk about violence against women, abuse, gender discrimination, unhealthy patriarchy, and toxic machismo, this story is still there to remind us that the rights we take for granted were won piece by piece, one step at a time, with effort, sacrifice, and unimaginable suffering by women like Franca Viola.
A great Italian.
No comments:
Post a Comment