X-rays of Broken Bones Show Violence against Women

Ahmad El-Assasy

An exhibition at the San Carlo Hospital in Milan, Italy, showed violence against women through X-rays of victims.

One bold doctor dedicated the exhibition to show the grave assaults on women of their husbands, ex-husbands or friends, and to show "the daily horror seen in ambulance rooms."

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"Women often don't have the power to tell what is happening to them, but the bodies and injuries speak in their tongue and reveal a state of daily horror," the doctor says.

"That's why I decided to show house violence as we see it in the emergency rooms of broken bones, noses, and hands, crooked wrists, dark eyes, stabs, strangling marks, signs of torture with glass shrapnel, or even a dagger in the back."

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It was the idea of trauma surgeon Maria Grazia Vantadori, 59, who wanted to show the stark reality of what she has seen in her 26 years of practice.

"I didn't want it to be gory, just to show something true, real and not fake. This is telling the truth, it's not made up," Vantadori told AFP.

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"The good thing about X-rays is that we're all the same, substantially. Our bones are all the same. So any of these could be any woman," she said.

In Italy, 142 women were killed through domestic violence in 2018, up 0.7 percent from a year earlier, according to Italian research institute Eures, a number that campaigners say is disturbingly consistent.