The Women's Action in Genoa

• Published in: Peace and freedom (1978) 2001-10, Vol.61 (4), p.16
• Main Author: Starhawk
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Civil rights; Enforcement; Law; Law enforcement; Organizations; Police; Poverty; Sex crimes; Sexuality; Slavery; Social conditions & trends; Society; Violence; Women
• ISSN: 0015-9093

I remember looking at the group with some trepidation. Three months before, I'd been in Quebec City, spiral dancing at a similar wall with tear gas canisters flying over our heads. Quebec had felt like a battle, and I wondered if these women were prepared. For much of the past year, I'd been training activists for actions that no longer resembled the relatively quiet, controlled blockade-and-get-arrested scenes of years before. Instead, since the very first morning in Seattle, long before a single window was broken, we've faced increasingly escalating police violence, from tear gas and rubber bullets to the live ammunition used on protestors in Gothenburg, Sweden and Papua New Guinea. Most of those activists were young, with the resilience, energy and illusions of invulnerability that allow youth to take great physical risks. These women were middle aged. I had to remind myself firmly that I myself am middle aged. I thought of some of the amazing older women I'd been in protests with or in jail with over the years, and I knew that these women had a different kind of strength and resilience, that came from experience and life wisdom. On Saturday, the day of the big march, [Lisa Fithian] and I saw Vincent, one of the French students we trained, at the medical clinic. He had been beaten on the street, arrested at the hospital, and taken to the police station where the police pinned his arms behind his back and smashed his wounded head into a table over and over again. It was swollen to the point where he looked like a space alien from Star Wars, but he was more upset because they took his papers and without them he didn't dare go to the march. Others reported being tortured in rooms with pictures of Mussolini and pornography on the wall. I thought of Susan Griffin's work linking Fascism with the fear and hatred of women's bodies. We watched in shock as they carried out a stretcher, then another, and another. Four, 10, dozens. There was a line of people who could still walk, with their hands up, their faces mirroring our shock. Later we heard the accounts of what had happened. A special force from Rome, trained by two highway patrolmen from Los Angeles, had entered the building and beaten people senseless. They broke ribs, knocked out teeth, smashed arms and legs and skulls. When they finally left the building, we found a scene of unbelievable destruction: smashed computers, people's belongings scattered and trashed, and pools of blood in every sleeping spot.