news

The pandemic of femicide

Worldwide, 50,000 women a year are killed because they are women. Covid-19 increases domestic violence.
An article by Ulrike Wagener (Neues Deutschland)

For a 2021 without femicides. Judging by the pictures, it was mainly women who demonstrated for this in Guatemala on Tuesday. According to the National Institute of Forensic Medicine, 140 women were killed in the country between March and June 2020 alone, around half of which are classified as femicides. This is what it is called when a woman is killed because she is a woman. And usually people from the victim’s close circle, family members, partners or ex-partners do it.

To give just a few examples: In a village in France, the police were called on Wednesday night because of a case of domestic violence. The perpetrator, with whom his ex-partner apparently had a custody dispute, shot three of the police officers and was later found dead himself; the woman survived. In Isselburg, Germany, the police arrived too late last Thursday; a man had already killed his wife, child and himself.

This phenomenon is global. According to United Nations estimates, 137 women worldwide are killed by a family member or (ex-)partner every day, about 60 per cent of all women killed worldwide. In Germany and France, a man kills his partner or ex-partner almost every third day, which is over 120 femicides per year per country. In Turkey, the initiative “We stop femicides” counted over 470 femicides last year.

These murders are still far too often portrayed as “family dramas” and private tragedies. But they are actually a structural problem of patriarchy. “Nobody kills for love. It is about power, it is about property claims, it is about subordination, it is about control in gender relations,” Cornelia Möhring, women’s policy spokesperson for the Left Party in the Bundestag, told this newspaper in November. UN human rights expert Dubravka Šimonovic even calls femicide and violence against women and girls a “pandemic” of its own, overshadowed by Covid-19.

The Corona pandemic was often referred to as a burning glass last year. It made already existing social problems and injustices more visible – and magnified them. Women have been particularly affected by this crisis. On the one hand, on the health and economic level: 70 percent of the nursing staff worldwide are female. In the pandemic, access to gynaecological care was partly restricted; the UN estimates that the Covid 19 crisis will lead to seven million unwanted pregnancies. Women perform even more unpaid care work. At the same time, sectors where women are predominantly employed – hospitality, retail, tourism – have been particularly affected by layoffs. Women workers in the informal sector in Europe alone lost 70 per cent of their income in the first month of the pandemic. The gender poverty gap will continue to widen as a result of the pandemic, the United Nations predicts.

Last but not least, violence against women and girls has increased with the pandemic. People had to stay in their homes during the lockdown, those affected by domestic violence had less space and time to escape, counselling services could sometimes no longer be used or could only be used to a limited extent. There are still only few reliable figures on this increase. The helpline “Violence against Women” has registered an increase in counselling of about 20 per cent since the beginning of the pandemic. A spokesperson told “nd” that this was a direct effect of the exceptional situation, but also pointed out that this did not necessarily imply an increase in domestic violence.

So it can also mean that more people are seeking help than before. This is an important step. The large demonstrations of women in Mexico, Guatemala or most recently in Poland make oppression of and violence against women more and more visible. There are numerous initiatives like the Kurdish 100 reasons, the Swiss stopfemizid or the Spanish Femicidio that document murders of women. This is the only way to bring the problem to the attention of society and ultimately move politicians to do something about this gender-based violence. According to the UN, women’s acceptance of violence by their partners fell by 75 per cent between 2012 and 2019. Finally, a good figure.

https://www.neues-deutschland.de/artikel/1146218.haeusliche-gewalt-die-pandemie-der-femizide.html

Also interesting...