November 25th: how to care in a world accustomed to violence

Some days come around every year like a forced break, a moment suspended in time that interrupts our rhythm and asks us to turn our thoughts towards what we often leave on the margins of everyday life. November 25th is one of those days: a necessity, in the form of an invitation, to pause and openly acknowledge truths held within, even if these are not often named. This is the day during which we openly address gender-based violence, not with the coldness of press releases or the distance of institutional rituals, but with the intimate awareness of those who know that this reality does not belong to others: it belongs to us.

As I gathered my thoughts on what I really wanted to write, I realized that starting from the feeling of pain would not be enough, not because lacking urgency or burdensomeness, but because pain only tells half of the story. The other half is about what we can build, the ways we take care of each other, and the networks we weave almost without realizing, which silently become the antibodies we need.

Reflecting on vulnerability and relationships, political philosopher Judith Butler believes that we become vulnerable in each other's hands. This concept, which might be perceived as a warning, is rather a profound invitation to recognize that prevention does not only take place in courtrooms or through regulations but arises in the fabric of daily human exchanges, in the intimate geography that we build together and that can sprout a different way of protecting ourselves.

The problem lies not in the stories, but in the normality they convey

Each year, as we approach November 25th, statistics reappear like familiar ghosts: numbers that trace femicides, assaults, psychological, economic, and digital violence. Data unfolds as we observe and question these numbers, searching for a way to understand them. But what's most striking isn't the numbers themselves, rather their disturbing normality, the fact that they recur with an almost ritualistic regularity, as if they were part of a landscape we've learned to recognize without being truly shaken by it.

A woman that is beaten, isolated, controlled, or even killed, is defined as a "tragedy" within a system that treats this as an unpredictable natural event and not as the product of a deeply rooted culture. This should make us reflect much more deeply than we do. Bell Hooks, who turned care into a political practice, argued that love cannot exist without justice. This applies not only to intimate relationships but to society as a whole: without justice, there is no protection; without protection, care remains a private, fragile, and insufficient gesture.

When we count, we see

To fully understand the scope of what is happening, we must return to numbers, but only after assessing that numbers are never cold, nor are they ever neutral. Numbers are narrative tools, lenses to interpret the world, and ways to assert that a topic deserves attention. In her latest book, “Perché contare i femminicidi è un atto politico“ (Why is counting femicides a political act), Donata Columbro clearly explains that counting isn't about making a list, but rather making a gesture of public responsibility: deciding that a phenomenon must be brought to light, made visible, and saved from trivialization.

Italian data tell us with piercing insistence that most women that are killed knew their perpetrators. Not strangers, or outsiders, but partners and ex-partners. Alongside femicides, violence comes in other shapes that often remain unseen: control disguised as protection, economic violence that limits autonomy and becomes blackmailing, and daily micro-controls that define the horizon of what a woman may and may not do.

As Columbro points out, counting is saying that we don't accept this as normalized reality. It's the first step toward recognizing that what seems inevitable is, in reality, deeply constructed.

Caring isn’t the opposite of violence: it’s a structural antidote

This is why talking about care becomes inevitable. Care is not the sentimental antithesis of violence, but its social counterpart. In recent years, part of the narrative insisted on the idea that violence is a sudden event, a dramatic and isolated incident. But this is not the case: violence lives and thrives in a culture that struggles to read signals, that relies on rigid, often invisible, deeply rooted roles.

Reflecting on the ethics of care, Carol Gilligan reminded us that it is not a matter of gentleness or natural inclinations, but of collective responsibility. Care, from this perspective, is not comfort. It is not a relief; it is an infrastructure, a form of presence that offers new possibilities, a practice that makes violence less likely because it builds a different cultural humus, day after day. 

Communities don’t save women, they save everyone

Violence perpetrated against women affects the kind of society we choose to be. Every time a woman asks for help and hits a rubber wall, that failure affects her and all the social structures that failed to welcome her: schools that fail to teach empathy, workplaces that fail to read the signs, neighborhoods and informal networks that lack tools to intervene promptly.

Conversely, every time a woman finds a network that makes space, that listens, that supports, we are witnessing an act of cultural prevention. These stories, often untold, change the horizon of possibilities. Judith Herman captures this well in “Trauma and Recovery”, describing how healing never occurs in solitude, but in a community capable of containing trauma. It's a thought that speaks as much to the aftermath as it does to the past: the possibility of building a barrier that reduces violence before it even takes place.

What can we do out of the spotlight?

When we think about violence, our minds immediately turn to the most extreme situations: an emergency call, police intervention, official statements, commemorative red benches in the squares, or red shoes aligned in the streets. These are images we know well because they have become the public symbol of a problem, the visible representation of something that, in its essence, manifests itself much earlier. True prevention, the kind that digs deep, lives in less visible places, in moments that usually go unnoticed, in the fragments of everyday life where the very possibility of violence is built (or crumbles).

It's in informal conversations where we choose not to minimize what a woman tells us, even when it involves doubts or feelings. It's in the willingness to listen, without over-rationalizing, without categorizing. Prevention lives in the normalization of asking for help, in building an environment where a woman can freely express "I'm not well" without feeling judged, weak, or exaggerated.

It's also the responsibility of those around us: friends, colleagues, neighbors, and the community as a whole. Recognizing subtle controlling behavior is already a political act, because it breaks the cultural silence that allows violence to germinate. Prevention is, ultimately, a form of collective emotional education: learning to see what we previously ignored, to name it, and to take care of it before it takes over.

Today’s simple, uncomfortable question 

What society do we want to be when no one's watching? It's a question that doesn't require ideal answers, but deliberate choices. It asks us to consider the spaces we're creating (in families, workplaces, schools, and relationships) so women can live without fear. It asks us to recognize the dynamics we accept, the jokes we let slide, the behaviors we justify, and the silences we don't break.

Above all, it requires us to question the forms of care we are cultivating as a community: whether these are real spaces, whether they are accessible, whether they are shared. Care that remains confined to the private sphere, entrusted to individual sensitivity, doesn’t support the transformation needed enough. Collective care, on the other hand, creates a different social climate: more attentive, more capable of recognizing vulnerabilities, more ready to support and intervene.

Rebecca Solnit considered hope to be an act of "civic imagination". This image helps us to see healing in a different light: not something born in the individual sphere, but a practice of shared imagination. It means seeing possibilities where the present is closed, building scenarios where violence isn't taken for granted, deliberately choosing to be part of the solution, even when nothing dramatic is going on, because the foundation for what we will become in the future takes shape in everyone's daily lives. 

An inconclusive conclusion

November 25th is not a commemoration. It is a reminder of what we can be. An invitation to not take for granted what we suffer, what we see, and what we can change.

We cannot bring back any of the women we have lost, but we can work every day to build a country that does not lose them again. This is not achieved through grand gestures, but through the perseverance of smaller, everyday gestures, ones that often go unnoticed but slowly change the emotional climate of an entire community.

And on this journey, freedom is something that we can’t achieve alone: ​​it is a space that expands only when we’re in it together, when we support each other and transform our individual choices into a collective movement.

I would like us to remember this, today and always, because it’s the only way we can act to shape the future into something that is, finally, within our reach.