Today I write to you to tell you a sad story. The story of women spanked, violated, harassed or killed by their husbands or boyfriends. Statistics tell us that one in every three women suffer some kind of abuse during their lives, but the annual reports still surprises me.
Today, all Portuguese national newspapers write about a NGO’s report saying that at least 21 portuguese women were killed last year by their male partners or ex-partners. Other 57 escaped a murder attempt and the team responsible for the report says that the real numbers can be worse because this statistic is based only in media report and and some cases don’t appear in newspapers.
For me one of the worse news is that many of the victims had already finnished the relation with the abusers and others presented complaints to the police.
Despite the progresses achieved in these last years and all the campaigns to create a public awareness of the problem, Portuguese authorities seem incapable to give the women abused the protection they need.
3 responses so far ↓
1 sondesbk // Feb 20, 2008 at 7:36 pm
ces histoires dépassent le mot VIOLENCE!!! c’est de la CRIMINALITE!!! et c’est atroce…
2 sondesbk // Feb 20, 2008 at 7:55 pm
Et la violence morale qu’est souvent pas visible!!! c’est aussi une torture pour un bon nombre de femmes de part le monde…une agression qui pourrait mener à la folie et même au suicide… et le coupable est raremnt blamé!!!
j’ai déjà trois temoignages de femmes à ce sujet…je pense à ecrire un poste…
3 AH (London, UK) // Feb 24, 2008 at 12:28 am
One thing that many people rarely think of with ‘domestic violence’ is marital rape. I had never given it a thought until I was in Ghana, when at the time (2006/7) there was ongoing debate about the Domestic Violence bill, which was being contested over a clause that aimed to protect women against forced sexual relations within marriage.
It was a subject and I guess a concept that surprised me, but that women were about to be denied the right, upon entering into marriage, of saying ‘no’ to sex, is a form of gender-based violence that shouldn’t be ignored. The bill has now been passed, with the inclusion of the marital rape clause.
See the following article from a research project from the Institute for Development Studies:
http://www.pathways-of-empowerment.org/GhanaDV.pdf
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