Victim Blaming: Being a Victim Twice. Comparison of Emotional and Socio-Cultural Aspects

World Health Organization Director-General Margaret Chan said that violence against women is a global structural issue. It is a health problem of epidemic dimensions, the analysis of 141 researches carried out in 81 countries shows that 35% of women suffer some form of violence during their lifetime. These data were presented in the largest study ever done on the physical and sexual abuse suffered by women in all regions of the planet. When we talk about violence against women we refer to the definition provided by the United Nations and the World Health Organization. As regards the definition provided by the UN, the expression covers "any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering, including threats of such acts, coercion and arbitrary deprivation of liberty, both in public and private life". The WHO definition outlines violence as "the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself. But the definitions don't end there. The Convention of the Council of Europe, the first regulatory element on the matter of preventing and combating violence against women, states that the term "domestic violence" refers to all acts of violence, whether physical, sexual, psychological or economic, occurring within the family or household or between current or former spouses or partners, whether or not the perpetrator shares or has shared the same residence with the victim. The document, which starts from the same cultural reading of the roots of violence against women, commits the signatory states to protect women from all forms of violence and to prevent, prosecute and eliminate violence against women and domestic violence. The Convention requires states parties to organize "specialised immediate, short- and long-term support services for each victim of any act of violence falling within the scope" of the Convention. Unfortunately violence is a dynamic event, in fact it is constantly changing, so we are witnessing a continuous transformation of the forms of violence. In particular, in this study we will address the issue of secondary victimization, which unfortunately represents an increasingly present form of violence. citation. This form of violence was defined by the American psychologist, William J. Ryan, Jr, who in 1971 defined it as a phenomenon of secondary victimization.