“Violence doesn’t end when the weapons stop: violence continues to burrow into those who suffer it.” This was said by Maria Ida Santopaolo, a 29-year-old pharmacist, victim of an attempted femicide on the night of 2 June, in her town in Terranova di Sibari in the province of Cosenza, recounting her experience in a press conference at the Chamber of Deputies.
“One of my closest friends ambushed me outside my house. My life has radically changed”
The one he considered “one of my closest friends – he explained – ambushed me under my house, armed with knives, giving rise to a brutal and violent attack” only because “I exercised my sacrosanct right to say ‘no’ in front of a man who expected a romantic relationship from me”. “Today my physical wounds – he pointed out – are healing, but my life after that episode has radically changed. I find myself facing – he revealed – a profound post-traumatic disorder and exhausting. The fortress of my independence has collapsed: today I am afraid of being physically alone, I am constantly terrified that someone could attack me or harm me at any moment. Even if my rational mind knows that in certain contexts I am safe, my body does not know it. My body responds to stimuli in an altered way, even where there is none alone, which brought me back to an almost infantile fear of the dark, and which makes it immensely difficult for me to find even just a modicum of that serenity that was taken away from me.”
The role of the school: “Educating children from an early age on the value of respect”
For Maria Ida Santopaolo it is «fundamental to introduce and promote profound emotional education, which must certainly start from families, but which must find a structural and central space in schools. We must talk to kids, educate them from a young age on the value of respect, the recognition of the boundaries and limits of others, and the acceptance of rejection” and this is precisely his goal of going to schools to testify to his experience; it will start from Calabria but it hopes that other Regions will also call it to bring its testimony to as many young people as possible.