P.M. for My Human Rights
Domestic violence isn't over with the woman leaving home, it extends and often takes on even more serious dimensions in the so-called post-separation abuse . Cases of femicides related to the non-acceptance of the man with the rupture of the abusive cycle and, consequently, of his control over the woman, are frequent. They are daily in the media, they are recorded in statistical, regional and global data, and there is no lack of international recommendations related to preventing and eliminating violence against women and children.
There is also no lack of manuals providing standards for legislation and reasonable procedures in order to provide a minimum of protection for the victims, often fatal, of this crime, unfortunately so common and trivialized in our society and, despite all the efforts made by organizations such as the UN and the OAS, there is also no lack of nations ignoring the observations issued by the mechanisms for the protection of women and children. Nations that seem to reproduce the same pattern by acting with total lack of caution and diligence in determining custody and visitation of minors in situations of domestic violence. Often, at least in Brazil, women are compared to the myth of Medea, are stereotyped as vindictive and spiteful, reinforcing rooted beliefs that denounce a discriminatory society that ends up invalidating the testimony of survivors, as well as their chances of seeking for protection. However, despite public agents and legal professionals keep doubting their testimonies, the numbers do not lie, and cannot lie, as they are numbers of deaths. Twelve women are murdered every day in Brazil, a country that is responsible for 40% of all murders of women in the Latin American and Caribbean region.
Women and children killed inside their homes, even after reporting the violence. Victims who are pushed to attend mediation hearings with their abusers. Coerced to ask for the forgiveness of those responsible for the violations, in a complete switch of roles, while they are once again placed at risk, and even greater risk, as they betrayed their aggressors, denounced their abuses, and will have to pay for the failure of a judicial system that seems to get lost in a utopian conciliatory speech that disregards the reality of vulnerable people when proposes a complete detachment from the violence suffered by women and its repercussions on their sons and daughters.
It is time for the the courts to be able to work in a standardized way, according to internationally established criteria. Brazil needs to react, it needs to get off the podium of domestic violence. It urgently needs to vacate its prominent position in the world ranking of femicide and child sexual exploitation and abuse, and it needs to do this through education, making accurate data and scientific research recognized by the global academic community available, providing safenet for women and children and establishing boundaries between a crime and a conflict, since domestic violence is not a family conflict.
