Objective: Eradicate Violence Against Women

Every day, we open our eyes to the media to discover, shocked, that there is already one more victim. A woman who died at the hands of her partner or ex-partner. Violence against women seems to have no end.

Terrible femicides that could have been avoided in many cases and that, in turn, are a reflection of a society where something is happening. The economy and industry are advancing, but it seems that many mindsets are not keeping pace. 

How are these behaviors explained? Why is violence used towards who, until not long ago, was the person they claimed to love?  Incomprehensible acts that force us to reflect on a very serious reality.

Gender violence in our society

While it is true that the vast majority of victims are women, we are aware of the existence of many men who, in turn, are also silent victims of different types of manipulation and mistreatment by their partners or wives.

However, the statistics of women who died due to the violence of their partners or ex-partners is already in many countries a social alarm that raises consciences. It is a reality that no one can deny.

It is necessary for all agencies to act together:

• Political spheres.
• Assistance organizations.
• Security services.
• The population itself.

Everyone must work in a harmonized way to offer support to women who are in danger of being assaulted in any way.

The education

We are aware that this problem has its origin in a deeper and more elemental essence: in human awareness, in education, in the transmission of values, and in a respect from which it is understood that loving is not possessing.

Violence is not a language, nor an instrument, and even less an end in itself. Violence is the most irrational and punishable act of the human being and a shadow that we must eradicate at all levels

Femicide

It is very possible that we have ever heard the word “femicide.” This term contains many of those realities that we live in our day to day. Regardless of the country, religion or language.

It was Diana Russell, a feminist, activist and writer, who used it for the first time in 1976 before the International Tribunal on crimes against women in Brussels (Belgium), to explain the different forms of violence against the female gender:

• It is the murder of women at the hands of men because of hatred, contempt or sexual abuse of them.
• There is an undercurrent of misogyny, machismo, and the use of violence for purpose.
• Violence is exercised over the life, dignity, and integrity of women.

We also have to bear in mind that there are many types of aggressions, where there is no need for a “death” to continue to be used for gender-based violence.

A living death

We could say that many women today experience “a living death”; that is, far from appearing in the statistics as violence against women or gender, there are millions who live in prisons of silence without daring to reveal their problem. To report.

These are the realities they must face on a day-to-day basis:

• Daily contempt.
• Emotional and psychological manipulation.
• The annulment, the continuous use of irony to undervalue women.
• Physical abuse.
• The control and manipulation of children to isolate the woman.

Education and violence against women: a key factor

Experts tell us that the problem lies at the very root of education. However, education does not fall solely and exclusively on the family. We are all “educational bodies”.

• Society itself also educates and for a long time we have lived in the essence of a civilization marked by patriarchy, in which sexism, misogyny, and man’s control of the public sphere are implicit. Meanwhile, the woman remained in that private plane oriented to parenting tasks.
• In many countries, violence against women is ratified by a legal context: marriages with girls are agreed, women have common rights such as freedom of expression, to dress as they wish …

What happens in societies that apparently defend gender equality?

• The idea that women are subject to men  remains implicit in many mentalities.
• Some men play an emotional role in which love is confused with domination, control and jealousy.
  • They do not know how to manage frustration.
  • They suffer from a feeling of inferiority that translates into anger.
  • A “covert” personality in which there is the most irrational anger or the inability to show empathy.
• Sometimes there is a legal vacuum or a lack of means to offer safe help to women.

It is often said that, sometimes, domestic violence takes place because one of the two members experienced such abuse in their childhood, or saw it reflected in their parents.

Now, this is not always the case. It is very difficult to understand or predict when a man can react in such an excessive and incomprehensible way  against the woman “who claims to love.”

What would we need broadly to eradicate violence against women?

• The union of all the powers of society : we must concentrate efforts both on education and on laws that articulate the protection of all victims and offer good social assistance.
• Awareness : it is necessary that both the family, as well as the neighbors or co-workers, support and identify any situation that leads to suspicion of abuse. An abuser can be our neighbor, or that friend who, from time to time, treats his girlfriend badly.

We must educate our children in equality, in emotional intelligence. It is vital that we develop in them the ability to feel empathy, to manage frustration, that a “no” must be accepted and not faced with anger, that to love is to respect in harmony without submitting, and to accept, at the same time, personal freedom of the loved one.

Eradicating violence against women is the responsibility of all of us .