‘Fathers, I need you in the fight against femicide’ | Columns & Opinion

Fathers I need you

I’m writing this on the women’s page, but this time have a message for men. Dear gentlemen, I need you. And I don’t mean your brute force or machismo. The world has really had enough of that. No, I mean your care, your support, mentorship and love. Your fatherhood actually.

Tomorrow is Father’s Day and congratulations on that. I can only hope that that day goes very well for you, but on that special day I want to draw extra attention to a deadly problem that affects you too: femicide. The murder of women because they are women.

Femicide

In the Netherlands, a woman is murdered by her partner or ex-partner approximately every eight days. That equates to about 44 women per year. We score higher than countries such as Spain or Italy. However, more and more attention has been paid to this phenomenon. We don’t know much about this yet. We therefore tend to think that these kinds of primitive things do not occur with us, but that is unfortunately patently untrue.

So I need you. Those 44 women a year is a lot more than people die from terrorism here, and yet we allocate more money to counter-terrorism. Logically, people might say: terrorism is political violence with the aim of instilling fear. My position is that violence against women is nothing else: domestic terrorism. A reign of terror within four walls with a political goal: to perpetuate the hierarchy with fear mongering as a means.

House dictator

Many women and children live at home in a mini-dictatorship with a one-man army to keep them under. Sometimes such a house dictator kills his own subjects and we call it a family drama. Our euphemism for the gruesome murder of your own family. Most women who are murdered have a long history of domestic terror. Victims do sound the alarm, but are helped too late or are not taken seriously, precisely because there is still too little information available about this phenomenon.

Most often murder is out of jealousy: you know, the principle ‘if I can’t have you, then nobody’. We use a cowardly euphemism for that again: the far too romantic ‘passion murder’, while of course it is just our western honor killing.

Women are also often killed when they want to divorce or flee. In all these murders, the obvious motive is possessiveness and the exercise of power. The victims are seen as the property of the home terrorist and if they don’t do what he wants, he decides their life or death. The woman as property, instead of equal. A mindset. An ideology even. So political.

I need you

And that’s why I need you. To change the mind, educate and inform the people. I need your support when the umpteenth know-it-all on the internet tells me that my actions aren’t going to help, that women should stop drawing the blood under their killers’ fingernails and step out of victimhood. That feminism actually causes femicide.

I need you to make the prevention of violence against women a much higher priority. That investments will be made in good relational and sex education in schools and beyond. In the promotion of expertise in the police and the judiciary.

I need you as educators of your sons and daughters. And, if like me you don’t have children, as allies in the care of a better, less violent world. As fathers to mother earth.

44 red heels

You can help me raise awareness of the issue and promote the idea that women are people, rather than candle holders or subjects in your home dictatorship. Strangely enough, this message mainly appeals to gay men, while I also need straight people to help convey that we are friends, equals, partners, complement each other. Lead and follow each other. Like a dance. A bond, a gathering. Side by side. Him by side.

This Sunday there will be an art manifestation on Dam Square in Amsterdam to draw attention to femicide. 44 men will put 44 red heels there as a symbol for the women who lost their lives this year. I hope to meet you there, by my side.

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