1:16 - FEMICIDE EMERGENCY - PART II
By Lidia Lidia
With this work I am trying to highlight the imbalance between the numbers of the victims of terrorism and femicide and the disparity of action in response.There is an urgent need for European countries to change their legal framework or at least to incorporate a definition of 'femicide' into their criminal laws, which none of them have. This is in sharp contrast to the common European definition of terrorism that has been established since 2002 in a document obliging an alignment of national legislations, including the implementation of preventative measures.
When in 2018 I first read the numbers just published by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) on the study of gender related killing of women I was so upset... 50,000 women and girls were killed around the world in 2017 at the hands of intimate partners or family members, meaning 137 per day, about 6 every hour. And these numbers were just counting victims of 'active' femicide. What about all the women and girls who died because of human trafficking, all the women killed as 'war strategy', or those starved and/or otherwise fatally ill treated?...
I couldn't stop talking of the dreadful reality of femicide and the more I talked the more I discovered that the majority of people didn't know the meaning of this word.
For the International Women's Day 2019 I self funded a 3 Metre long mobile billboard van which was driven through London's streets emblazoned with the statement 'In 2017 in Europe 184 people died as victims of terrorism, 3000 females died as victims of femicide'. The back of the van was supposed to show a smaller panel carrying the definition 'Femicide: the intentional killing of females (women or girls) because they are females'. The van arrived 4 hours late, without the rear panel and when I got upset about it they installed the wrong panel. I was devastated for the result of my project. I asked the company to redo it in the correct way for the 25th of November 2019 on occasion of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, but they refused with the excuse of my bad temper. They preferred to refund me...
But even though they gave me my money back it took me months to recover from the bad experience and my project was still there in my mind needing to be realised with dignity and respect. So the 2 statements have been printed on PVC boards that I have been wearing during the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence lead by the UN. I have been in Manchester (25th November), Liverpool (26th and 27th November) and in London (from 28th November to 10th December).
I am very grateful to all the people who stop to talk with me sharing their experiences: surprisingly more men than women.
Even though the first 4 days have been very difficult because due to a bad cold I didn't have a voice at all to interact with people who stopped me to know more, I can say that it is a very rewarding experience!
