Women and girls too

The discovery of the body of Olivia, the Tenerife girl presumably murdered by her father, Tomás Gimeno, puts us before a two-faced variant of the gender-based crime. Certainly, it is what is called vicarious violence: Ricardo Carrascosa told his wife, just before killing (in 2018) his two daughters, "I'll kill what I love the most". A sadistic and calculated way to assault a woman, seeking her maximum suffering. Carrascosa committed suicide, Gimeno seems to have committed suicide too. Once again the essence of male chauvinism is confirmed: the impotence of men when what they thought was theirs slips away.

However, the 39 children killed by gender violence in Spain since 2013 cannot be reduced, in my opinion, to cases of vicarious violence. It is also parental violence that participates in a widespread idea: that children are the property of their parents. And that they can do whatever they want with them. An idea that we see reflected in figures such as the pin parental, which Vox intends to impose, to give parents absolute control over their children's school curriculum, forgetting that they will only grow according to their ability to act on their own. Women and children under the power of the male, who can dispose of them as he sees fit. This is the doctrine.

As always in the face of horror, the short view leads to the Penal Code, and there are already those who have rushed to call for life imprisonment. It is a way of turning the page until the next murder that leads nowhere. There is an educational and cultural problem of societies that were built on the myth of the power of men and the submission of women. Mentalities need to evolve. That's why feminism today is revolutionary: it questions the centre of power that structures our societies. And the best sign of change would be for society to be sensitive to the drama of patriarchy, for taboos to be broken and for victims to find the necessary complicity to feel accompanied and thus anticipate extreme situations before they have to secretly call for help or run away to the police station.

Josep Ramoneda is a philosopher.