Me too movement In Italy

Minerva project, co-funded by the European Foundation for Progressive Studies, counted 2 million tweets, from around one million Twitter users, from October 2017 until April 2018 of the hashtag #MeToo all around the world. 

While this was happening all around the world, in Italy during 2017 Asia Argento, Italian actress, was the first Italian woman using #metoo. 

Both men and women agreed on sentence like: “you deserved it”, “before you give it away and you complain”. 

#metoo not only didn't pay off, but the situation for women got worse. Since 2018, the proportion of men who said they were reluctant to hire women in male-dominated employment has risen from 15 to 21 per cent.

Italian movement #quellavoltache collects more than 20,000 hashtags. The prevalent age of the episodes witnessed is very low: many minors and very young women.

After reading several opinions, articles and statistics we noticed two trends: on the one hand the 20,000  young women who joined the campaign; on the other hand, both women and men in strong and offensive opposition.

Apart from these data, it has been really difficult to find the needs of young people expressed directly by them. From the lack of this confrontation about gender roles and power, and from the study of Italian society, we can affirm that safe space to speak about gender, is absolutely needed. 

Italian national statistical office, by the Equal Opportunities Department, offers us a society framework :

The most common gender role stereotypes are: "for men, more than for women, it is very important to be successful at work" (32.5%), "men are less suitable to take care of household chores" (31.5%), "it is the man who has to provide for the economic needs of the family" (27.9%). "It is up to the man to take the most important decisions concerning the family" (8.8%); 

 When asked why some men are violent with their girlfriends/wives, 77.7% of respondents respond because women are considered property (84.9% women and 70.4% men), 75% because men need to feel superior to their girlfriends/wives;

63.7% of the population considers the violent experiences lived in the family during childhood as a cause of violence, 62.6% believe that some men are violent because they cannot stand women's emancipation while the association between violence and religious motives is high but less frequent (33.8%)

70% of suicides in the world are committed by men. Two-thirds of men’s deaths in the United States from opiate overdoses is "not because their bodies are weaker than those of women, but because when they do not achieve a certain ideal of masculinity, they isolate themselves.

The statistical survey on gender role stereotypes and the social image of violence against women and, in particular domestic violence, represent multiform and complex phenomena, whose knowledge is essential for the development of law enforcement policies and the construction of the monitoring system of violence against women. 

These phenomena are rooted in gender culture and this is why it is necessary to detect stereotypical patterns related to the roles of women and men as well as the social image of violence.

The three most destructive words a father or mother can tell their young son? "Be a man":

by helping young men and boys understand that they don’t have to conform to archaic aggressive stereotypes of masculinity, we can reduce antisocial behaviour, mental health struggles, suicides, gender-based crime and domestic violence.”

 https://www.economiacivile.it/online/progetti-2/

https://www.ilfoglio.it/societa/2019/09/17/news/il-metoo-ha-peggiorato-la-situazione-delle-donne-sul-posto-di-lavoro-274619/

https://www.wired.it/play/libri/2018/03/10/quella-volta-che-molestie-libro/