Dear Editor,
Regardless our life upbringing we are free to choose who we are and who we want to become. I was raised in Italy in a family where unfortunately domestic violence was a multigenerational factor. I have witnessed both my grandfathers, using physical violence against my grandmothers, but the most disturbing reality I had to face as a child was my father, repeating the same pattern of violence on my mother.
I don’t want to go into the gory details of how many times my mother was sent to the hospital for consequences of my father’s violence, or how many times she was dragged on the floor like an animal, or hit just because she refused to cook a meal late at night. I remember me as a child trying to defend my mother from my father’s cowardly violence and getting hit in the face by the man who supposed to be there to protect me.
In a time and a country where divorce was still a stigma (Italy 50 years ago), and a judicial system in the hands of corrupted male judges (one of the judges said to my mother: if your husband beats you, you must have deserved it), when I was about 10 years old finally my mother found the strength to divorce my father. My life changed, and I decided to leave the comfort of the home and to go to the boarding school, to alleviate the responsibilities of a single mother who just became also a cancer survivor. Since early age I grew up watching violence in my family, and I could have the excuse to repeat this pattern of perversion, but I made a choice: I chose that I would never hit a woman, especially the mother of my children. I chose that violence is a tool only to use for self-defense or the defense of innocents. Children should never witness such acts of violence by a father, and only cowards can beat a woman who is half of his size.
I am almost 51 now, and in all my past experiences with women, I never touched a woman with a finger unless for pleasure, and I had more women than I deserved. Do not get me wrong, I am not saint, I have my own faults. I can be loud, I can use words, I can be silent, I am still a human being, but violence against a woman was never excusable. This is why I believe that self-defense is a human right that belongs to every human being, regardless sex, color of skin or religious belief but especially should be learned by people like women who can be a disadvantage against a stronger attacker.
I want to leave you with this message: “We are result of our past life, but we should never be enslaved by it. We are free to choose who we want to be and what path we want to choose”.
If you are a woman who has suffered the experience of domestic violence I invite you to the free self-defense class that I am sponsoring at Kingman Force on Force Saturday, May 25, starting at 10 a.m. To book, email info@kingmanforceonforce.com or call 928-263-0071.
Gianluca Zanna
Kingman
