“This year 2025 we already have 11 women killed in the field of gender violence. It is essential to make the minutes of silence, which bring to the table a reality that, at times, is still quite hidden.”
The Head of the Coordination Unit against Violence against Women of the Government Delegation in Melilla, Laura Segura, in an interview given to Onda Cero today regretted that the fact that a woman has been murdered is being normalized: “It does not open the front pages of the media, it is not in the debate of the citizens, in the conversations, in the day-to-day.”
However, he stressed that “it is one of the great problems that our society has, today” especially when in our country a woman is murdered every six days.
“It should be the main problem for the citizenry,” he said, and yet, according to the CIS, the city perceives this problem in a very low position. “I always, when I talk about this reality, go to the CIS surveys of 2017, because we are worse at assessing the reality of gender violence,” he said, a year in which this issue was ranked 19th.
“We have to see that the reality of gender violence is a terrible reality and that it must concern the Spanish citizens, because if we do not work from there and we are not raising awareness in society, we will continue to make these women themselves have to ask for help, and it is not society that stores that friendly hand and begins to change in a structural way so that violence does not end in the most extreme violence, which are murders,” he warned.
Negationism and social media
In the radio interview, Segura has addressed the reality of gender violence among girls and young people. Thus, it has reported that, according to the latest study on violence against young women, 6.5% of young women have suffered physical violence.
However, he assured that, “when we work with them, in the educational field and talk about a push, they do not consider it a physical violence, therefore, they are not verbalizing violence that they are. Therefore, we have to see there how it is actually reflected in the data.”
What does offer hope, she has apostilled, is the fact that young girls do consider violence against women “some aspects that until very recently were not considered” as well as that “we begin to see how girls talk to us about feminism as a reality that changes their lives for the better”.
The other side of the coin is offered by young boys who “begin to see feminism as a threat”, something that “the administrations are concerned about”. At this point, the Head of the Unit has stressed the importance of teaching with young people.
“The work we do from different spaces, especially from formal education, is fundamental, but everything educates, and even if we are going to give talks to the centers, even if there are equality plans, even if the teachers are trained, everything has to educate and has to go hand in hand,” he argued.
However, “social networks are educating on their own, and maybe a one-hour chat can be very little if we compare it with the information that is continuously reaching them through the networks, with a very sexist message and that, in addition, is very contrary to equality.”
A reality that also occurs in the political sphere. “We are also seeing a political polarization in something in which we were all very clear, which was the fight for equality,” he said. Some messages that are coming from certain political spaces “and that are very much in line with those messages of negationism of social networks”.
“We renewed the Pact of State again, but it is true that now we have a party like Vox, which does not support this reality,” he explained while before all political formations were to end violence against women.