Taking care of care-givers represents an important part of our commitment.
Recognizing humanity and dignity, welcoming women victims of violence and offering a space for listening to their stories, even the most terrible and unspeakable, means a process of emancipation from stereotypes and prejudices, offering the possibility of a path of re-subjectivation and of exit from the condition of victim through the recognition of the power of one’s humanity.
The approachof care-work in a care-centre is a first step in the process of care-giving that, in the case of women who have encountered devastating experiences of violence, derives from the way we structure the treatment starting from the common language in the meaning of “victim”. It means sharing the way out of an involuntarily dogmatic and ideological meaning in defining a person as a victim, because dogma and ideology are parts of a narrative that can determine an involuntarily assertive perspective of language, which in turn implies defining a person by blocking her in the absolute of what she has undergone, identifying her in this position. A victim is forever. Like a diamond. Accepting, welcomming and listening to the words of these women means offering the disposability to enter in the terrifying reality of the other. Being aware of our position means being able to meet the archetypal dimension of the survivor and implying a possible space, not yet known, in which we can authorize ourselves to become beyond the dimension of trauma.
A world addicted to violence and its commodification often leads to a shift in gender identities on a use of the term that defines who suffers and survives violence, which we can instead always welcome and listen to as a person with a subjectivity, a knowledge of herself who has the possibility of redefining herself by leaving the ontological short circuit of the process of subjectivation good-and-evil and inside-and-outside. Between being a subject of oneself and being an object of the other. And it is precisely this shift, this inversion of meaning that is the most delicate obstacle to overcome.
Taking care of the individuals who welcome and listen to these women’s stories implies the willingness to descend the words of hell to give us the saving possibility of hearing the feeling starting from giving voice, word, dignity and practicability to what resonates in the deepest internal world, and question the competence that we can exercise (which we are able to exercise) on our human competence, be it existential or professional.
It is an honor for us in LABC to have renewed the collaboration and support to the colleagues, lawyers, operators and volunteers of the Non Sei Sola (you are not alone) anti-violence center in Biella.
