A young Argentine fights a society that considers violence against women normal.
2025: Thousands of women took over the streets for ‘‘Woman’s Day (8M)’’. Photo by Sol Scannapieco
By Federico González Chapur
In early November, Sol’s neighborhood experienced a four-day power cut – a normal occurrence in her working-class building. She went down to a nearby kiosk to charge her phone — the kind of street corner where neighbors hang out — and had two beers while waiting for a date. The first one was on her; the second, a treat from a guy she had called ‘‘friend’’ for the last eight years.
Almost immediately, her vision blurred. Sol knew something was wrong. She could barely read her phone. Luckily, she was only a few meters from home, her safe space. Panic surged through her veins. The next thing she remembers, she was in her flat with her intended date. She couldn’t remember anything happened in between. She had been drugged.
A fierce feminist living in a hostile environment. Sol knows that being socialist, protesting, or confronting the police in Javier Milei’s far-right government in Argentina is no game. But still, she doesn’t care. Anger and a sense of justice flows in her blood. She is a literature teacher in a special-needs school during the day, and a fighter during the night — an imperative, she says, that goes for everyone: ‘‘This is not my story, this is the life of all women.’’
While talking on the phone, her first phrase was “Hey, let’s speak later, I’m in a public restroom locked in.” She sent a picture — keys in her hand. “This is how we live,” she wrote. “Locking ourselves so no man can force the entry.”
The past still shadows her. As a teenager of fifteen, she remembers classmates finding it “funny” to touch her at school. She stayed quiet; the teachers looked away. At parties, worse things happened. “I remember when Tobías (one of her classmates) put me against the wall and locked me with his arms,” she says. “He started kissing me; I couldn’t move. Then he grabbed my hand and put it on him. I cried and ran, and the boys laughed.” No one knew what to do. Back then, it wasn’t considered an anomaly — it was normal. If girls complained, people asked: Why didn’t you run? You must have liked it. “That was rape,” Sol says quietly. Most of her friends, she adds, went through similar situations, often with men they knew and had to keep seeing as if nothing happened. “It’s traumatic,” and her voice breaks.
When she turned eighteen, her political ideas hardened. She moved from Mar del Plata, her cozy hometown by the sea, to the chaotic and diverse Buenos Aires where she threw herself into activism against machismo, for LGBT+ and abortion rights, almost immediately. But another blow came at twenty-five: an unexpected pregnancy that turned into a long, painful abortion that broke her faith in her own strength. “I felt like everything I believed in was falling apart,” she recalls. The debate was still going on so abortion was yet illegal. Many called abortion a homicide. Only a few women could afford an illegal abortion, others would just try with hangers or herbs risking their lives, and many died. But Sol could pay for it, and still her life was endangered: her gynecologist followed up but it wasn’t possible to be in hospital in emergencies due to illegality. Excess blood loss, lack of nutrients and dehydration put her on the edge many times. Her friends went to live with her, and her mind repeated the arguments spitted by the antiabortion catholic groups: ‘‘Assassin, homicide, you are killing a child’’. She knew it was not true, but after weeks of spending more time in the bathroom losing blood than in her own bed, she lost track of her beliefs.
A year later, Sol was having a normal weekend in her flat in Buenos Aires. Tidying up everything after a busy week and cleaning the mess. When she was about to take a shower, someone knocked on the door. It was her neighbour from downstairs, a man around 60 years old. She could feel something was wrong, but the neighbour claimed that some water was pouring down to his flat through the pipes, so Sol kindly let him check the toilette and see if he could fix it. Next, a nightmare. The guy started locking her in her own bathroom, in her own house. She tried to get out but she couldn’t. Paralyzed. He started approaching her, trying to kiss and touch her body. Suddenly, she managed to push him against the wall, open the door, run, and start screaming in the hall. The guy left. Sol started crying and called the police, but they could not do anything. Instead, her friends went immediately to stay the night. Afraid of being in her own house, afraid of being alone, afraid of taking a shower. That’s how she felt for a long time. She never saw him again and some months later he moved out of the building. But the trauma remained.
Still, she kept fighting. Studying, teaching, organizing marches on weekends. Her apartment walls are covered with protest posters and abortion bandanas. In university, she advocates in the Communist Party, and she teaches her students how to behave as human beings through literature.
Sol has lost count of how many times she has protested and confronted the police this year — in front of Congress during protests for public education, at her university during a campus occupation, or in the massive “Ni Una Menos” march that began in Argentina in 2018 and helped win abortion rights three years later. Her fear vanishes when she’s fighting. “We shouldn’t have to teach everyone how to behave,” she says.
A few weeks ago she came home furious after reading that three girls had been found dismembered — murdered by a man who had lured them with money for a “party.” The killing was streamed live on Instagram. More than twenty people watched, but no one called the police. “This hate and violence was only because they were women,” Sol said. “If it was a man, it would have been different.” In Argentina, one woman is killed every thirty-six hours — in what’s supposed to be the safest country in Latin America.
When I ask if she ever feels safe, she laughs. “Safety doesn’t exist here. But at least I know what I’m fighting for.”
Sol’s story is the story of most of the women living in this patriarchal society where violence, abuse and rape, are not anomalies. Asked about the attempted assault two weeks ago, she said: ‘‘Fuck them all, I will move from here, I’m not safe,’’
Others live in denial or minimize sexual violence: ‘‘When I talked to his friends, they pretended nothing happened,” she said. “It’s normalized.’ This is how they live. Stepping back and remaining silent would be an option for many, but Sol’s sense of justice and beliefs place her in the opposite direction. She fights.
Now, every day she wakes up at five, reads her literature assignments for university, and gets ready to teach in a special-needs school in Buenos Aires. In summer Sol watches the sunrise from her small balcony in Villa del Parque; in winter she faces the cold from the inside. But always, no matter the season, she drinks a mate, an intense traditional tea popular in Argentina. “Every morning I wake up with disappointment and frustration,” she says. “I’m sad. Living in the Milei era is one of the worst things that could happen.” The news, she says, is always bad. Getting used to it feels like self-defense. But she doesn’t get used to, Sol fights. “Just don’t rape, don’t kill, don’t abuse.”