Majlinda Bregu: Violence is not a problem that victims can solve
2024-11-25 10:35:13
TiranaPost
On the International Day of the Fight against Violence against Women and Girls, Majlinda Bregu has distributed a powerful message with statistics and facts.
How is the situation of women in the Balkans? What about in Albania? How has the online world influenced the promotion of violence? Where should we intervene and why is violence not a problem that victims can solve?
You can read all of this below, in the writing of Majlinda Bregu.
By Majlinda Bregu/ "Nothing happens immediately.
In a bathtub of water that gradually heats up, you can boil and die without realizing it."
This description by Margaret Atwood from "The Handmaid's Tale" is the perfect metaphor for the cycle of violence against women which is never an isolated episode triggered by "fatigue", "stress", "nerves" or "passion".
No! These are just excuse labels learned over the years.
It is always more than a moment, it is a persistent and insidious approach, reinforced, valued, rewarded or simply neglected.
1 in 3 women worldwide admit that they have been a victim of physical, sexual violence or pressure either by a partner or a stranger at least once in their life.
In our Balkans every month, since 2020, an average of 4 women have been killed and more than 66% feel the threat of domestic violence. (RCC, Securimeter 2024)
In Albania, 52.9% of women report one or more forms of violence throughout their lives. (Grevio, 2024)
As if the classic forms of abuse and violence, inherited over the years in our society, raised under the hoof of rape, were not enough, modern times, the times of social media and the unconditional freedoms and rules they have, have brought us a threat as well. the biggest, in front of which we are endangered, absolutely, all of us, women, men and children.
It is the danger of the homogeneity of the perpetrators, of the echo that the violence receives from the online windows, the terrain where anonymity bubbles with the most perverse forms of expression, mainly women, girls and minors creating the new crime platform, whose chronicles are imitating every day the peace of each of us.
Albania is the first country in the region with a paradoxical behavior for the online world.
43% of citizens consider the information they receive from social media to be reliable, but 59.2% are afraid of the consequences this information has on children. (RCC, Balkan Barometer, 2024)
Therefore, it does not surprise me that Albanians report the fastest increase in the phenomenon of online violence, with 12% of girls and 5% of boys.
It is true that violence is present in every corner of the world, sometimes openly and sometimes camouflaged.
With atrocities, murder, rape, injuries, threats, selective abortion, persecution, early marriage, and all kinds of discrimination against women and girls regardless of their economic position and social status.
But on a day like today, one should think a little longer that violence is not a problem that can be solved by the victims.
We need to think beyond the pathetic mediocrity of the posts, how the cycle of violence, - misogyny, the daily talk that girls and women should be seen and judged as the clicks want - sex objects and boys should be raised and displayed on the street, school, work and family, as custom loves, strong and vengeful men, - it repeats and keeps generations under pressure not only violent individuals.
Violence is only a symptom of the languishing of society, the anemia of the economic, political and family system.
But as in Atwood's metaphor: Nothing happens immediately.
In a bathtub of gradually heating water, you can boil and die without realizing it.”
