Educational tools on the violence against women in Italian society.

Over the past several decades, despite the fact that the status of women has changed in the family, in the workplace and in civil society, lingering conflicts and problematic aspects reveal that actual equality has not yet been reached. Substantial differences between men and women in everyday life remain. Pockets of resistance prevent the full realization of the right to citizenship in terms of law, politics, science and education. The female disadvantage nowadays differs from the one in the past: today, the oppression strategies boosted by patriarchy assume the most disparate and hidden physiognomies, among which the resumption of sexist, racist, xenophobic and fundamentalist cultural paradigms, tending to strengthen the exclusion of the ‘others’. These strategies are far more difficult to detect and they simply creep into collective thought. In Italy, in particular, gendered violence has become a major social problem, capturing the interest of media and public opinion. Nevertheless and to some extent, it is still mainly a hidden event that is not yet interiorized by social conscience. This makes it difficult to plan and deploy adequate actions to address it. The present contribution analyses the question of violence as an issue related to miseducation and dehumanization in today’s society. The media system keeps on building a distorted vision of the relationship between sexes, strengthening the invisibility of women and of alternative sexual identities, defending the hetero-normative stance and promoting sexualized images, with the result of contributing to gendered violence. Through the lens of feminist critical pedagogy, the aim of this paper is to identify the contours of an anti-violence pedagogy, in the attempt to reduce the cultural forces of dehumanization, replacing them with humanization options.