“Black week of sexist violence,” summarizes the news, bringing together the four cases that occurred between last Saturday and Wednesday of this week. Three women and a girl murdered, another woman in a coma and two minors injured. It is good for society. add tragedies, present them in batches; this is how the thick minutes dedicated to a news item that is usually considered “a scourge” are cut. And, to tell the truth, a tiresome news item that does not sell, that sounds outdated even though it is bloodily installed in the present. “Another death,” we say to ourselves with a rueful pout.
I wonder what would happen if these four fatalities had been stabbed or shot by terrorists of any stripe. We would redouble security protocols and take to the streets with banners and slogans. But they are just three women and a girl dejected by those who one day seemed to love them and ended up confusing the bond with possession. Fortunately, the guise of a crime of passion has faded in official discourse, although a significant part of the public still denies that it is gender violence. The one who continues to consider relationship problems as private matters. Despite the irreparable damage.
Now, what is left on the landscape after the crime? A cloud of oblivion covers that broken intimacy, and few remember the more than 420 motherless children since the cases began to be counted in 2013. There are no tributes for them and there is little financial aid, the minimum reparation for the horror. I think about the kids who have seen her mother die, bathed in blood, and also about that 13-year-old girl who jumped from the second floor trying to escape death.
In our country, one in four young men – between 15 and 29 years old – believes that sexist violence “does not exist or is an ideological invention.” Despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of young Spaniards – 87% – claim to know first-hand situations of maximum aggressiveness towards women in their own environment. The contrast of these two data provides the best possible argument to support the theory that the denialist extreme right is winning the cultural battle in this mournful terrain.
Vox questions the violence against women courts in Castilla-La Mancha, calls the concept of gender violence “ideological junk”, distances itself from the manifesto signed by all political groups in the Parliament of Andalusia and once again distances itself from the minute of silence in the Madrid City Council. Some will say that they portray themselves, and that theirs is a fine rain, but this chirimiri is especially felt among young people, lost in a labyrinth of distrust fertilized by precarious life perspectives, which contribute to misunderstanding the radical nature of the option. ultra.
Detractors of feminism and its struggles consider so much demand nonsense, re-victimizing survivors and ignoring vicarious violence, which is exercised against the most memorable thing in your existence: your children. Save the Children estimates that more than 200 million children witness episodes of violence between their parents each year. And in Spain, one in five minors has witnessed attacks against their mother because she was not silent, accommodating, self-sacrificing or solicitous enough as the father wanted. Real equality is a snail that only comes out after it rains. How much more blood will we need to understand it?
