The classic division of newsrooms into specialized sections means that some border issues receive very different treatment depending on whether they fall on one side or the other of the roof. These days there is a lot of talk about the burqa and its derivatives. That the PP is approaching Vox. That Junts also wants the ban, but to avoid being part of the same bloc, proposes Catalan competencies. The matter should not be about party acronyms. As a neighbor of the Raval, I am concerned about the increase in various coverings for women – and at increasingly younger ages, including girls – and I wonder if it would not be better for the Society section to deal with the matter. Because the arguments that are fired from politics are self-serving and leave aside the main ones affected by this unequivocal form of oppression: women. Banning the burqa, without more, is a measure that will worsen their situation, because it will remove them from public space. We will see them even less, but there will be those who consider the problem solved. The challenge is to remove the veils, not the women. And as long as the conversation is dominated by the perpetual partisan bickering – and the Politics sections transmit the endless barrage of slogans – they will continue under this yoke of fabric, invisible, two meters behind their husbands. Girls will continue not to go to summer camps. Not to do extracurricular activities once they reach adolescence. Without freedom to love.
Who will defend these girls who in a few years will receive all the pressure from their cultural system to be reduced to little more than reproductive and childcare function? Not the far-right, of course, but neither the exquisite left. We need long-term proposals and that, from the non-sectarian press, we push for the debate to be legal, social, cultural, and political... without partisanship.
