Breathe
By Mariana Conde
Tomorrow is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. Rather than allude to the verb celebrate, I think we should say protest, shout, claim, survive. I think it is important to have such a day and at the same time, it hurts me that it is necessary to have such an event.
Thinking about this day led me to two stories at once related and very different from each other.
If you were born after the eighties, you probably don't remember the movie The Accused, based on the true story of Cheryl Araujo, which marked many women and men of my generation. I, today, can't help but return to it and how painful it is to feel it still so relevant, especially when I think of the other case, one closer to me.
In The Accused, a girl, Sarah Tobias, has had a fight with her abusive partner and goes to a bar to meet her friend and forget her sorrows with a few drinks. She is not looking for solutions but for a temporary escape from her problems and the shelter of someone who knows and understands her.
Here in Mexico, 36 years later and also in very real life, Rosa feels that peculiar kind of nervousness of someone going on a date. She has only met him once before, but she feels she already knows him well, the result of hours of calls and messages, jokes and memes shared; she feels that with him she can talk about everything, be herself.
She doesn't tell Soco who she's going out with, not wanting to be judged for going out with an older man. She simply asks for directions to the place where she is supposed to meet him and tells her companion that her father will pick her up there. Why there and not where she always goes? She answers something vague and that's the end of the conversation.
Rosa chooses her prettiest blouse, lets her hair down and walks in a hurry to the bus stop. The truth is that she loved him since the first time they met. At first she was taken aback because he looked several years older than in his profile picture, but his kindness and great sense of humor soon erased that gap.
Sarah Tobias arrives at the bar where her friend works and has a few beers while waiting for her to finish her shift. There are several men watching her and she is feeling flirtatious, dancing a bit, giving glances. One approaches and buys her a drink. They play music on the jukebox in the back room, they dance.
"I'm Miguel, friend of Carolina's brother-in-law's colleague. I saw your picture and I would like to meet you. I'm not one to send messages to people I don't know, but I asked my friend to let you know, I hope he does." That's how they start talking two months ago until Rosa agrees to meet in person.
You can imagine the rest of both cases. The repeated story of men who want what they want and won't take no for an answer. Nothing is more important at that moment than their desire, their needs. They don't think about the girl whose life they will ruin, they don't think that their three minutes of pleasure will turn for her into decades of trauma, nervous tics, suicide attempts. They do not think. The rapist only seeks to satisfy himself, to feel a few seconds of friction, to ejaculate.
In Sarah's case, three men take turns raping her and there are just as many bystanders cheering them on with cheers and applause. She denounces, undergoes medical tests, identifies her attackers, finds a prosecutor empathetic to her cause. She seeks justice, but against her is her cleavage, her flirting, her drunkenness, her drug use. And yet, with great difficulty, some luck and a little bit of failure, she manages to get both her attackers and the applauders convicted.
For Rosa there is no law, process or vindication. She is raped in a vacant lot and alone and that event will define a before and after in her biography, not only for the event itself, but for what comes after: to denounce in a police station where, in spite of being a Justice Center for Women, she is attended by men who instead of empathy show an ironic suspicion; to undergo a gynecological examination, indispensable, it is true. Being summoned the next day to rectify her statement only to return two days later to find that fundamental facts and data in her file have been changed. The shrug of the officer's shoulders. More turns, same lack of humanity, same lack of results: come back in fifteen days, it is difficult, what were you doing with that man, why were you dressed up, maybe you had been drinking... Again the victim trying to convince everyone that she is a victim.
This happens every time a woman denounces a violent act against her. For this very reason in The Accused, the original title in English is intentionally vague, using the neuter in both gender and number: The Accused. It could be them, but it could also be her, as in fact happens when pointing out the way she dresses and behaves.
Months go by until Rosa and her parents, tired, stop going to the MP to ask how the case is going. Each visit is a useless re-victimization and soon they understand that they will not find justice. In spite of having the name of the rapist, of reporting his photo on the networks; in spite of feminist marches, prosecutors' offices for the defense of women, crimes catalogued as gender crimes, delegates, laws, edicts, offices, words, words, words, words, words.
Incredible as it may seem to Rosa, he still exists at liberty to erase her fingerprints and her profile picture, to ⎯imagine her⎯ go to work or whatever it is that rapists do in their daily lives: have breakfast, have jokes with their friends, go visit her sick godmother. At liberty to cheat and rape other girls like her.
Rosa will have to remember forever the person she hates the most. To erase him will be almost impossible.
In Mexico ⎯ according to studies by the Belisario Dominguez Institute, cited by the Senate⎯ 243 women are raped every day. Only 27% of rapes are reported and less than 1% of those guilty of any sexual crime are sentenced to prison.
Violence against women has increased significantly during the last six years. The one that has grown the most? Sexual violence. This increased, according to INEGI data, by more than 8% between 2016 and 2021. The political agenda for the defense of women, of their minimum rights, is written in faint and weak ink. There is talk, there is discussion, there are decrees, appointments and the acronyms are changed to the same stale and inefficient institutions; a coat of pastel colored paint, a web page and that is as far as the transformation goes.
There is less than progress, in some cases there is regression. Today, if Sarah Tobias had become pregnant after her multiple rape, in certain states of her country she would be forced to bear that child. This dangerous trend continues to gain ground in the United States where legislators seem to be more efficient in promoting laws that limit women's reproductive rights than those to protect their physical safety and dignity; with a second term of Trump and the ultra-conservative right this will only get worse. Meanwhile, in Mexico we have seen several recent cases in which underage girls who have been raped have gone as far as jail for not wanting to have the child, and even, in an outrageous nonsense, having to pay financial retribution to their rapist.
Although it will take years, Rosa will overcome the trauma. Because not doing so is unthinkable, because she has parents who support her unconditionally, because of a newfound courage that leads her to seek psychological help and a collective of women who have gone through the same thing. Because, against all odds, she decides that this will not define her.
Or at least that's what I wish for her and for so many Roses.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
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