Black week of male violence”, summarizes the news reports, bringing together the four cases that occurred between last Saturday and Wednesday of this week. Three women and a girl killed, another woman in a coma and two minors injured. It is good for society to add tragedies, to present them in batches; this is how the thick minutes dedicated to a news story that is usually considered “a scourge” are cut. And, if we must be frank, a burdensome news that does not sell, that sounds like the past, even if it is bloody installed in the present. “Another death”, we say with a composed gesture.
I wonder what would have happened if these four fatalities had been stabbed or stitched up 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 shot down by those who once seemed to love them and ended up confusing the bond with possession. Fortunately, the guise of a crime of passion has fallen from official discourse, although a significant part of the public still denies that it is gender-based violence. The one who continues to consider couple messes as private affairs. Despite the irreparable damage.
What remains in the landscape after the crime? A cloud of oblivion covers this broken intimacy, and few remember the more than 420 children orphaned by their mothers since the cases began to be counted in 2013. There are no tributes for them and little financial aid, the minimal horror repair. I think of the children who have seen their mother die, bathed in blood, and also of that 13-year-old girl who jumped from a second floor trying to escape death. In our country, one in four young men – aged between 15 and 29 – believes that male violence “does not exist or is an ideological invention”. Despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of young Spaniards – 87% – affirm that they know first-hand situations of maximum aggression towards women in their own environment.
The juxtaposition of these two data provides the best possible argument to support the theory that the denialist ultra-right is winning the cultural battle in this mournful terrain. Vox questions the courts for violence against women in Castilla-La Mancha, considers the concept of gender-based violence “ideological junk”, dissociates itself from the manifesto signed by all the political groups in the Parliament of Andalusia and again distances itself from the minute of silence at Madrid City Hall. Some will say that they portray themselves, and that theirs is a thin rain, but this chim-chim falls in a special way among young people lost in a labyrinth of mistrust, paid for by the precarious life perspectives that contribute to misinterpreting the radicality of the ‘ultra option.
The detractors of feminism and its struggles consider such a claim to be pointless, revictimizing the survivors and ignoring vicarious violence, which is exercised on 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 aggression against their mother because she was not quiet, complacent, selfless 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?
