Dear comrades, dear all,

we want to share thoughts that cross our minds and from which we could take inspiration to move forward in our common commitment to culturally overthrowing patriarchy. 

Chiara Valerio's invitation to the editorial initiative "Più libri più liberi" to Leonardo Caffo, at the time "only" investigated for violence against his ex-partner, opened a distance that we believe should be filled by an open discussion, starting from the assumption that patriarchy infects everyone. However, we have a tool to break its dynamics: the relationship between us, the basis and foundation of the bond of strength of sisterhood. Is it enough? Is it enough to break the roots of male privilege?

For many decades, as activists of the Rete D.i.King, we welcome women into a relationship between women, empathetic and respectful that has made us grow practicing sisterhood even before the cry "sister I believe you": we have given and give trust to the story of women respecting the singularity of each story. We do it alongside women when they dare to reveal violence committed by respectable men, transgressing the order of silence because they also question hierarchies of power. We know that the judicial path that a woman undertakes to have violence recognized is full of obstacles and has costs, we know that women's times do not coincide with those of Justice, that prejudices weigh, that society hides, tolerates, minimizes and justifies male violence and that the social status and reputation of men is reflected in the credibility of the woman, regardless of the trial, the facts and the testimony of the violence suffered.

The principle of presumption of innocence, when the perpetrator of violence is a man with prestige and power, risks translating into presumption of mendacity of the woman, branded as false, profiteer, crazy, mythomaniac or slanderer. An asymmetry that permeates the process and goes beyond the courtrooms and that causes isolation and secondary victimization well before the sentence.

The Caffo affair offers us the opportunity to reflect among ourselves on something that we have evidently not yet unraveled: the dynamics that are activated when the man accused of violence is not the "foreigner", but the friend, the partner, the son. 

It is an opportunity to reflect on the accommodating role of the Italian media whenever a man of power is accused or convicted. The phenomenon of violence against women is often reduced to a private matter in which silence and minimization are passed off as respect for the "principle of innocence" but we know that there is much more at stake. 

To compare and build a new and participatory path in the fight against patriarchy, we will organize soon in the new year a moment of sharing between women who inhabit feminism in various ways so as to compare ourselves again hoping to untie these knots, to tell each other to what extent patriarchy concerns us.

D.i.Re - Women on the Net against violence