-OpEd-
TURIN — There are events that change the course of history. They wedge themselves into the collective imagination and transform it. This can occur through exceptional events and exceptional people or, in a way that seems almost contradictory, through absolute conformity to the norm.
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Some facts, that is, adhere so well to the standard model that they become emblematic. The story of Giulia Cecchettin‘s femicide is one of the latter: a gigantic deposit of archetypes, motifs, symbols, typical traits of femicide, a story so unbearably predictable that it becomes a symbol.
Last November, Cecchettin, a 22-year-old student, was stabbed at least 70 times in a shocking murder that prompted protests over violence against women across Italy. On Dec. 3, her ex-boyfriend, Filippo Turetta, also 22, was found guilty for her murder and sentenced to life in prison.
A symbolic story
The first archetypal development in her tragic story is the mystery of the missing woman — mystery with a very obvious outcome. Anyone, upon learning of Giulia’s disappearance, imagined the epilogue, because they have known it for millennia.
From myths, from history, from the prototypical stories of male violence, every woman learns to know the ending, throughout the world and in all eras. From the eternal warning to “be careful”. From daily news.
The second archetypal element is the man’s obsession with control. And this case is a striking, textbook example of this: Cecchettin was killed just a few weeks before graduating with a degree in biomedical engineering — from a future of work, earnings, self-determination. From an autonomous life.
Seeing her freedom
Every femicide comes from a man seeing a woman as his property, and seeing her freedom as a human being as an outrage to his honor.
The murderer is a normal person, and even more so is the victim.
And then, another archetype: Turetta runs away after the murder. Escaping, a theme firmly anchored in our imagination, the accumulation of millennia of history, literature, myths, experience. Ulysses, Lot, the Holy Family, all portray escape as an act of salvation and rebirth. Being masters of one’s own existence and destiny. Cecchettin is punished for having an autonomous will. Turetta is, even after murdering her, the architect of his own freedom.
The last archetype concerns the mechanism of identification. In the history of Cecchettin there is no monster, nothing grotesque, deformed, aberrant. Turetta is not a psychopath, a criminal, or a drug addict. And he is not a foreigner, an immigrant.
He does not belong to any of the categories that scare us — or that politicians exploit to scare us. The murderer is a normal person, and even more so is the victim. Cecchettin did not put herself in danger, she did not provoke him, she did not cheat on him.
A new truth
She did not adhere to any of the disgusting stereotypes that, still today, lead us to blame the victim and make us say “It’s partly her fault” and “It couldn’t happen to me.”
Cecchettin has confronted us with a simple and frightening truth: There is no shared guilt, not ever, in a femicide. What happened to her can happen to any of us. To our daughters. To our sisters, a term that feminist movements have been using in their marches against gender violence in recent months.
Cecchettin tells us that there is nothing exceptional in her story, that all femicides stem from the same, predictable root: control.
What is really new and revolutionary, in Cecchettin’s terrible and ordinary story, is her family, her legacy. Gino and Elena Cecchettin, her father and her sister, show us a very courageous truth: The world belongs to the living. It is up to the survivors to move forward, to honor the memory of the dead, to draw from them an example and a lesson.
Because today, one year after her killing, femicides in Italy have not decreased. So we must act. The Giulia Cecchettin Foundation, the activism of her family, the protestors desire to make noise are what makes her memory indelible and exemplary.
