The Head of the Unit Against Gender Violence, Laura Segura, has presented the institutional campaign of the Ministry of Equality ‘Are you going to do something?’, which is aimed at sensitizing society about the need to act in the face of any case of gender violence in their environment.
“The campaign was born out of the need for victims’ environments to play a more active role in preventing gender-based violence, which is fundamental to moving forward,” he explained.
In Segura’s words, the role of the environments is not limited to filing a complaint but goes much further. “It is essential to accompany the victims, listen and give the victims the support they need,” he said, while stressing that it is also “a way to show the aggressors that they are alone, because the victims have the support of all their environments, of the whole society.”
Deepening this idea, Segura pointed out that “it is important that neighbors, friends, professionals with whom the victim interacts and also the aggressor know that the door is always going to be kept open, so that the victims do not feel shame, nor blame when they take the step to seek help”. “One small step for each and every one of us can be decisive in the lives of many women,” he said.
In this sense, the campaign emphasizes that the environments can call 016 to explain the situation observed and receive professional advice or inform themselves of what resources of support and integral attention the victims can go to.
The ‘Are You Going to Do Something?’ campaign wants to show that comprehensive care resources are not just for victims and survivors of male violence, but that anyone can turn to them for official, useful and quality information.
“Progress is being made in this way on the path that began 20 years ago with the Organic Law on Comprehensive Protection Measures against Gender Violence, which took gender violence out of the scope of the couple and showed it as a structural problem of the whole society,” he stressed.
“We have a key challenge, which is to break the silence in the face of this violence, and to end the impunity of those who carry it out, but this is a challenge for the whole of society, so that the weight of the complaints does not continue to fall on the victims,” he said.
For all of this, Laura Segura has stressed that “we must continue to call on all citizens to counter, from all levels and unanimously, the negationist discourse”.
Speeches, he added, “perpetuate male violence and threaten women’s freedom, integrity and lives because they foster fear, shame and guilt in victims, making the doors of violence smaller.”