Carmen Bosco *
The discussion derived from the comparison on methodology obliges us to decline this term in the plural. As has happened for a year in our political school groups, we are faced with different methodologies, practices that have changed over the years from the original matrix, developed from the experience of each center, but also induced by the innumerable institutional pressures that today pose new challenges, new questions and new balances. Many questions were raised.
The need to reconcile women's politics with the rules imposed by the Conference of Regions; the precariousness of work and the extent of the burden that this entails for the younger generations who spend "free" for the center, the risk that where economic constraints exist, the center will lose its role as "director of interventions"; evidence of the fact that public tenders foresee within the Centers professional figures who do not historically belong to those designed for the centers themselves; the question of whether the reinterpretation of these professional skills within the center goes in the direction of enhancing them or not; hence the need to critically reflect on the topicality of the historically accepted idea that “non-medicalising” psychotherapy cannot be performed in the centers. There is a strong concern that there may be a shift in attention from the centrality of women and the relationship between women to the professionalization of the center and of the operators, distorting their very essence. But the desire for confrontation and contamination among us is equally alive.
However, it was clear to everyone that it is necessary to start afresh from bringing the woman, her history and her choices back to the center of each intervention, the role of the reception worker as a cornerstone of our methodology, the role of the centers as promoters of cultural change and contamination of social and institutional realities, starting from external professional figures in order to permeate even contexts that do not belong to us.
Different methodologies, therefore, but which pursue the same objectives and which allow us to recognize each other, respecting each other's diversity. And beyond the differences, the group has declined transversal constraints and preconditions to operators, lawyers, psychologists, social workers, who constitute an essential and identifying essence for the centers belonging to DIRE.
All women to be able to operate in the centers must have a feminist reading of reality and violence as the daughter of the inequality of power between genders.
They must have, even when they work as consultants, both legal and psychological, a close link with the Center, with its political project and have a constant practice of confrontation and exchange with the reception operators;
All the actions taken within the centers must be in close correlation with the woman's exit path from violence and aim at the best advantage of the woman herself in respect of her freedom and her self-determination;
The interventions will be free for women;
No to the practice of family mediation;
No to mandatory reporting;
No to any kind of evaluation, including parenting skills;
No to the organization of neutral spaces and protected meetings;
Incompatibility for lawyers with respect to the defense of ill-treating men and the obligation to be registered in the lists of advocates at the expense of the state;
Finally, from the group emerges the operational proposal to create an integrated multidisciplinary group (reception workers, lawyers, psychologists, social workers) in order to closely correlate the interaction of experiences: in fact, a collective force is needed to elaborate a thought that is made practice that can also be brought outside the centers, generate common languages, strengthen our credibility and our strength and encourage positive changes in culture and society.
* Thamaia Anti-violence Center