In Catalonia, twelve women have not had the opportunity to see the start of 2023 because last year their partners killed them. The last month of the year we have just closed has been particularly critical in terms of gender violence, with a surge in murders that places the total number of femicides in the entire State close to fifty. These are terrible crimes that, however, we should not understand as isolated incidents, but as the most extreme manifestation of a society, ours, still profoundly sexist.
Do you think I'm exaggerating? It's probably because you are men. Ask, if not, your mothers, sisters, daughters, or female colleagues how many times, throughout their lives, they have been victims of gender violence, especially sexual violence: a controlling partner, a superior who linked a subordinate's career advancement to the satisfaction of his lewd desires, a slimy basketball coach who disguises criminal touching as sports massages, the stranger who, as soon as he has the chance, corners victims in a dark alley to grope them before running away and disappearing into the night. There are hundreds, thousands of such cases, and most will never come to light. Often because the victims do not even recognize themselves or want to recognize themselves as such and, of course, the abusers don't either.
A couple of years ago, I read a report in El País about the selective murders of girls in India that chilled my blood. The journalist Indira Guerrero reported that, in recent decades, millions of girls had died in that country because the cost of raising them had made their lives unviable. Newborn girls murdered by their own parents or aborted during pregnancy simply for being girls. Guerrero cited as an example the birth records of 132 villages in the Uttarkashi district, about 300 kilometers from New Delhi, where all 216 babies born in a three-month period had been boys. Officially, not a single girl.
We are not in India, nor in Afghanistan, where women can no longer go to university, or in Iran, where they pay with their lives for the audacity of not wearing the Islamic veil. However, I often hear people around me who, without blushing, maintain that they prefer to have sons rather than daughters. Some say it's because girls are more complicated and they say it so casually. Others say it's because, with girls, parents suffer much more, especially during adolescence.
Fathers and mothers unable to sleep every time their daughter goes out to party until they know she is back, safe and sound. Parents who are permissive with their sons, but controlling and overprotective with their daughters, because they know what happens in certain social and work contexts: I don't like you walking back at night, take a taxi, even if you're next to the house; I'm worried about you doing sports alone in Montjuïc or on the Carretera de les Aigües; don't wear this dress to go to work or university, it looks like you're looking for something... Shall I continue?
Don't have daughters, some say, half-jokingly, and I think it's not funny at all and it's time we took it seriously. To begin with, one of Barcelona's priorities for this 2023 should be for the city to be as safe for men as it is for women because it is evident that, for now, it still is not.