"Go be a prostitute, go home." This is the cry that was heard from the referee who was officiating a Serie D basketball game. The mother of a player shouted at her on the parquet of the Motta di Livenza (Treviso) sports hall, during a match between the home team and Feltre. There were six minutes left in the final period.
The referee, Alice Fornasier, a twenty-year-old from the refereeing section of Padua, had called some fouls against the son of the woman in the stands. When she felt that insult raining down on her, preceded by a "What are you doing here on March 8?", Fornasier stopped and started crying . The match was suspended, the two teams returned to the locker rooms for about twenty minutes. The author of the insults was eventually identified. There are no reports that the host club has taken any action against her so far, nor that the young woman has filed a complaint.
"She was more angry about the insult to March 8, women's day, than about herself," said the president of the regional referees federation of the FIP, Antonio Florian, who spoke to her on the phone to express his solidarity . "She seemed quite calm," he added, "as if she had overcome the initial discouragement, which however was great in her especially for those insults uttered on women's day."
Stop the distancing of the basketball club Motta Asd from the sexist insults. The club, with a note from the president Gianni Granzotto, wanted to dissociate itself «from any disrespectful or offensive behavior that may have been directed towards the refereeing couple, and has always been committed to promoting the values of sport, inclusion and respect». To confirm this, Asd Motta has also launched the project "Me Gusta Fare l'Arbitro", accompanied by the slogan "If I were your son, would you yell at me?", an initiative that has as its objective the protection and respect of the referees.
The referee, a university student, is not a novice; she has been officiating basketball matches for a few years now, and had never experienced an episode like this. The president of the Veneto Region, Luca Zaia, also intervened on the episode. "If a young female referee is subjected to sexist insults by another woman," he said, "it means that we must acknowledge with dismay that there are situations in which even shame no longer exists. Instead, the person who uttered those insults should be ashamed, and the young referee, to whom I extend all my solidarity, should be proud of herself."
