November 25 has been enacted and instituted by the United Nations Council as the Day against women's violence in remembrance of the Mirabal sisters who were murdered by the dictator Trohijo in the Dominican Democracy.
This sad event shocked all societies in the 1960's and was the ignition of awareness to protect and care for oppressed and abused women.
Women have always been considered the weaker of the two genders in every society. She has been ignored many times, treated with a lack of respect and expected to endure the incoming abuse in all aspects from physical to psychological.
The factors that position her as such are various and relate to the living level of her family, society and where she lives.
However, in the dawn of the third millennium, it was unthinkable to talk about women's abuse in a period where the parity of the two gender had been recognized and woman contributed a lot at the man's side.
Although, there are still societies where the religious and cultural element are so that woman's status is still positioned low.
The law 3500/2006, passed in Greece covers intra-family abuse, it helps to protect women who are forced to live and have to subdue to the abuse and tyranny of their partner, husband and sometime their father.
The issue of violence and abuse was and remains a common secret, which moves inside the family. Fear and financial weakness, often act as inhibitory factors for affected women's next steps. Despite all the basing and abuse that women receive from their husbands it is impossible for them to report it, because of fear of criticism from their family and the surrounding society.
Regardless of the institution and application of laws, we cannot report that women's abuse has been reduced. On the contrary, the percentage is still high and most of the cases come from rural areas.
The second aspect of abuse comes from the social surroundings and mostly from the work place under sexual harassment. In this case, women are disrespected by their superiors. We cannot omit discussing the physical rape that occurs with tragic results on the victim. There is no social discrimination and culture when it is about violence. It has always existed in all social classes without exception. The male animal instinct acts irrationally.
Here is the question: Are we here with roles already predetermined or have the societies throughout the centuries classified us as weak and lower beings; or the financial ideologies are responsible to have created the myth of inferiority?
No matter what, if we agree with the first or the second question, woman has not easily found her way. Through her continuous struggles, she tries to determine her position and her existence in the new coordinate in the axes of domination and subjugation.
Women tired of suffering and harassment, thrown and victimized bearing the burden of the unconscionable are on the first plan to narrate their story in front of millions of voracious viewers, stories that include mostly violence and that was the reason she was thrown to the woman's chaos, also having and caring for children just because they did not have the financial, moral and psychological support. Daily, we can hear the dramas, as it has become a way of life depicted on TV that from one side helps but on the other hand destroys, has become a salvific receiver like another Siloam baptistery where victims and victimizers are mixed up and filtered to be purified from the sins of the modern society for a better transient life.
Because violence is every act or thread of act of abuse connected to the gender and leads or can lead to physical, sexual and psychological damages or to a hardship for the woman. Women victims can be of any age, races and of a different educational and financial level. The tolerance to the abuse or to the victimizers is a threat that hits the living level, the personality and dignity of women. (4th Universal Conference for the Woman, Beijing, 1996).
Another phenomenon with huge dimensions connected directly to violence is women's trafficking. It has resulted from the immigration wave after the fall of the Soviet Union, when women from many countries started to spread to Europe for a better life. Special dominators, soul traders make them fall apart, weak, hurt, human souls by exercising unspeakable violence and abuse.
The actual days describe a tough reality, which renominates the woman deliberated and emancipated while at the same time, she is appealed to give merciless struggles for her day-to-day life and sometimes she has to subdue because of the financial that acts as an inhibitory factor and a factor of impoverishment.
However, the era of the dominant and the hard treatment has gone, it is time to raise ourselves as equal to equal as children of the same God enjoying the same rights without canceling our self respect and respect to the others.
Is that under this misery that society will receive once again the day against the women's abuse in remembrance of which event? How inferior and tired she is? Alternatively, how much the state has thrown her to the lost and found?
Let's keep struggling giving hands one to another making the weak link strong, inviolable and standing up like Amazons with power and respect to the societies of the strong and let's bring back on our mind the Novelist's Pablo Neruda words:
"The ruins were a pain
And you stood as a miracle"
Alexandra Symeonidou is a best-selling author in Greece and has published 10 novels, translated three French theater plays from old French to Greek and two children's books. "Nightmares in the Saudi Arabian Desert" is her autobiography and her first translation from Greek to English. It is available on Amazon.com.