For rewards in heaven…
My last day in Warsaw and I spend it with my mother in the kitchen, drinking coffee, telling her about a murder that took place last week in northern Cyprus. A man stabbed his wife to death because she tried to stop him from beating their three-year-old son. Afterwards, as you may have read, he barricaded himself in his house with his two other kids and threatened to kill them as well. He said he would not have a problem with it because he never felt loved by his family so the kids didn’t have to feel loved either. I wonder if such violence is really caused by a lack of love.
Apparently, it happens more and more often, in Poland as well. Men beating, torturing, even killing their children because they cry too loud, are naughty, don’t do what they are told. My mother, a teacher, says that the majority of Polish women do nothing when it happens. They are so afraid themselves they don’t intervene. So this time, in a small village, lost somewhere at the end of Europe, a woman was faced with a similar situation and tried to do something and got killed for her efforts.
I remember a case from a few months ago when a teenage girl, also in the north, got raped by two local men. The news caused an uproar in the community. The two men were almost lynched by a crowd, then the father of one of them was punished severely for the sins of the son. Since I am so far away and can’t check myself, I called one of my friends and asked whether the killing of the young mother caused similar protests. The answer was that a few people were saying something but not as many and not as strongly as in the rape case. I asked whether the family was Turkish Cypriot or from the mainland. “I am not sure,” said my friend. “But I have not seen an obituary for the woman in the local press so most likely they were from Turkey.”
Again because I am away I can’t go around and talk to people and properly research it. I don’t know whether the reactions was less because the family was from the mainland or whether people generally feel more strongly about the rape of a small girl. Probably both. But for me this murder of a young woman trying to protect her child is at least as significant (if not more so) and socially important. We still tend to close our eyes to the physical abuse of women and children that takes place all over world and not only in places that we tend to judge as being backward or different.
Let’s face facts. It happens everywhere. In my neighbourhood of southern Nicosia an eighty-year-old man used to beat his wife regularly in a ‘just in case’ way until the day he dropped dead. The woman, also in her eighties, was in hospital twice a year because of her injuries BUT if you think that she ever called the police for help, dream on, sweet Ophelia. Never. She treated it as part of her life. Something that both her family and the church told her to suffer and endure with patience. “You will be rewarded in heaven,” say priests in Poland in such cases.
In western Europe, statistics say one in five women is beaten by their partner. I once interviewed a MEP who deals with the subject at the European Parliament. She said that even her female colleagues in the institution, women well-educated and independent, admitted in private conversations to having such an experience. And most of them said they wouldn’t go to the police because they were ashamed and embarrassed. In the Balkan countries, a husband can knock his wife down just because it is the way to behave. You don’t believe it? There is an excellent book on the subject by Dubravka Ugresic. In Poland, the situation is the same again. Men beat women for serving them cold soup, because they are drunk, unloved, upset… There was a famous case not long ago, close to Warsaw in which a man was abusing his concubine every day, and the local police, despite being called, didn’t intervene because it was “a family matter”. The problem was, the man was aggressive also toward other people in the village (chasing some with an axe) so finally the farmers gathered together and exterminated him themselves. There was a trial, the men were let free, the policemen fired, a period of discussion in the press on legality and justice of such an action followed but the real question is whether all of it had to happen? And generally is there really nothing to be done, apart from lynch and murder to stop this situation from happening over and over again?
PS to local authorities. Just because it happens in other places too it doesn’t mean it is OK.
