LOVE DOES NOT KILL, SILENCE DOES

Greetings dear friends. Today I want to share with you a few lines about gender violence or violence against women. In Venezuela women die daily because of violence, at least two women are killed by their partners leaving a great emptiness, pain, sadness, family breakdown, and secondary victims in the fact. Other women suffer daily violence either from their partners, family members, or strangers who violate their dignity and end their lives. Today our women are raped, beaten, belittled, harassed, and victimized by a macho society that has built its superiority through the power and physical strength.

Many women today are victims of gender-based violence. Image credit: pixabay.com.

By referring to the phrase, of my authorship, "Love does not kill, silence does" I want to express through a campaign in social networks and media a basic principle through which life is kept in balance, love, this value is one of the most important that converted into feeling allows us to respect and care for the people around us, nature, animals and every organism and living being of which our planet is composed. Who loves does not cause harm, hence love does not hurt, does not hit, does not bleed, and especially does not kill. If people based their lives on love, violence would not exist.

Currently, gender violence is considered by the World Health Organization (WHO, 2020) as a silent pandemic that has increased with the pandemic factor due to the COVID-19 virus that keeps women locked in their homes with the perpetrator, that is, with the person who hurts them, unable to go to the authorities for fear, mainly, that the situation will be even more serious, in this case, the woman is in a disadvantaged position before the one who causes her harm and exerts over her a psychological dominance as well as economic, physical and power superiority. In Venezuela, according to official figures handled by the Police Investigation Corps and made public through the media and information, 45 women have been fatal victims of gender violence from January 2021 to March 2021; now how to stop this social decomposition that directly affects women and the family? Because violence is a problem of a higher order than deserves our full attention.

According to my experience in the communities giving talks and workshops aimed at the elimination of all types of violence and especially violence against women, I can affirm that there are two powerful tools for our world to change, so that the perspective and especially the mentality and behavior of people are different and this is first of all love, as I have already mentioned, and education. The formation of our women from childhood in terms of their valuation and respect is today more than ever imperative, our educational systems must direct their programs and designs towards the formation of a new culture where machismo and feminism are set aside, and we must learn equality and respect for the fact of being inhabitants of the same planet, born under equal rights as proclaimed by the Law of Human Rights but especially because we ourselves assume that no one is superior to anyone else and that we are all important and necessary.

Publicity image of the campaign "Love doesn't kill, silence does". Source: @emimoron.

That is why my campaign "Love does not kill, silence does", finds its raison for being in that the primordial thing is to love the person, the human being who is born with a gender biologically assigned by nature beyond the roles self-imposed by our society, starting from the fact that machismo is a social construction that has taken root in our existence to such an extent that we think and assume as normal behaviors and attitudes that are not. Today my invitation is to wake up to a new reality, to women who have been raped to not let themselves be carried away and trapped by fear, there are ways to break the cycle of violence, get out of it, and build a life based on mutual respect and especially on love. Today we must raise our voices against gender violence, it is no longer acceptable to be silent, silence is for cemeteries, and "Alive is how we love each other".

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Your Beloved: @emimoron