December 8, 2021

17:12

Iury Lima – Cenarium Magazine

VILHENA (RO) – Hearing comments with judgmental phrases like “so-and-so gets beaten by her husband because she wants to”, “she should have already reported the black eye and the scars on her body” seems commonplace to the reality of many. However, the reality experienced by these women victims of aggression is not always as easy as expressing a thought. It is always necessary to consider the reality of others.

For this reason, the noble act of courage of a 13-year-old girl from Rondônia, who used the blank space on a school test to write a cry for help deserves to be highlighted: “Please help me. My father beats my mother, call the police for me. To be able to deal with cases like this, it is important to have a debate about domestic violence in the classrooms, to have active support institutions, and to educate all levels of the population through government initiatives. 

The teenager’s denunciation, fueled by desperation, resulted in the arrest of the aggressor, whose identity was not revealed by the Civil Police, as well as the rest of the family. The mother, who refused to confirm the violent episodes, now receives support at the home of relatives. The student and her siblings of 16, 14, and 8 years old found shelter in the Guardianship Council of Vale do Anari (RO), 331 kilometers from Porto Velho.

Understanding the case

The distress call left on a school performance evaluation was made on November 9, in the small town of Vale do Anari, with an estimated population of 10,000 inhabitants. The case had great repercussion in social networks, ending with an outcome almost a month after the report.

According to the Civil Police of the neighboring town Machadinho D’Oeste, which assists Vale do Anari, it took more than two hours for the wife to recognize to the agents that she suffered aggressions from her husband inside the house. For Police Chief André Kondageski, the reason is clear: the emotional and monetary dependence, since the husband claimed that he would never let the children lack anything. However, the owner of this kind of speech kicked his own children out of the house after the accusation. In addition, the man said that the aggressions against his wife were motivated by the death of another of the couple’s children, who was around one year old, when they lived in Pará. The child had ingested rat poison by accident, and the aggressor blamed the mother.

The temporary arrest of the victim’s husband was decreed by the Rondônia Justice Department on December 3 and was carried out the following day. It was his mother who helped him hide, at her farm in the rural area of Vale do Anari. He was found in the bathroom and did not resist arrest.

Case by case

Gésica Bergamini, Master in Psychology and therapist of “Acceptance and Commitment”, explains why the denunciation can, in some cases, be the most difficult step: “The denunciation is very difficult, mainly because of the social construction of ‘being a woman’, the issue of vulnerability, the absence of public policies, an emotional and even affective dependence”, she said in an interview to CENARIUM.

The psychologist also evaluates the specific and aggravating aspects of the case in question, which involves a humble family from a countryside region, as well as the husband’s history of violence and the blame he placed on the woman for the death of the first child. “Usually, women don’t leave the environment of violence because they don’t have a support network to rely on or are emotionally and financially vulnerable to this situation. Remembering always that the violent subject can be persuasive, manipulative, and use these processes so that the person can’t react to it”, Gésica highlighted.

Mourning

For the Master in Psychology, it is inadmissible to justify the aggressions suffered with “poorly resolved” mourning. “When people say, “Oh, I hit her because our son died and it was her fault,” maybe she also blames herself. Maybe this guilt of having lost a child, this mourning, this blaming by this father, maybe the emotional shock of all this, can make this woman remain [in the situation of violence], but this does not justify the behavior of this father, it does not justify the violence”, repudiated the expert. 

“Here, we are talking about a person with an intense emotional dysregulation and, for sure, he didn’t start being violent and aggressive from this element, from when he loses a child. Possibly, he has always been aggressive, violent, and this has been a trigger for him to put into practice some behaviors that, perhaps, he had to a lesser degree and then, increase in intensity”, he added. “On the other hand, emotional dysregulation is not a justification for me to violate the rights of others.  I need to understand that my pain needs a resolution and that the other person is not to blame for that pain. Violence is never justifiable”, she pondered. 

She believes that the family should receive professional care to heal the internal wounds and move on. “Of course it is necessary to have psychological care, and socioeconomic support as well, because this is very important for this mother to have a new repertoire, a new look at life, and for these children as well. They need to experience this mourning process. Mourning for this family that will no longer exist. Mourning this brother (…) And all these processes”, he advised.

The power of the school and the weakening of the institutions

According to the expert, the school is the gateway to countless social ills. She also tells that she has been able to observe numerous cases of school negligence in the face of violence against mothers and children. “The school would notice the signs of suffering and everything else, and would not take any action because they didn’t consider themselves responsible for it. The school is not responsible for this, but it is the gateway and it does have, as its institutional duty, to work on education in relation to these issues, it does have the role of teaching about what is happening and the duty to take this subject to support, to help, in case it sees something”, warns the psychology major, emphasizing that it is not necessary to wait for the child to tell. “We can observe the child’s behavior, performance, and care, and call the Guardianship Council, the Military Police, in short, search within all instances”, she added.

“The school is one of the social axes of extreme importance and relevance in the development of the entire social structure. It is the second social group into which the child will be inserted, and one of the groups in which he or she will spend most time”, explained the psychologist and therapist.

She also regrets that not all schools in the country are prepared to identify the aggressions suffered by children and the signs of domestic violence suffered by other people in the family, besides criticizing the weakening of other organs and legal mechanisms. “We have a law, the Statute of the Child and Adolescent (ECA), the Unified System of Social Assistance (Suas), we have the Reference Centers for Social Assistance (Cras) and the Specialized Reference Centers for Social Assistance (Creas) that should, yes, be ready. But what happens today in the Guardianship Council is that many religious fundamentalists are there and many don’t feel prepared to do their job, and end up causing more vulnerability and more problems, like many cases that we see in the media, of which the Guardianship Council knew about, visited, and never took any action”, she exposed.

According to her, the school itself could create communication channels that favor denunciations, as a way to encourage, encourage, and support victims of violence, whether they are children or adults. “The school can make campaigns against child violence, domestic violence, sexual abuse, as we do, for example, in May, and can work on these issues, yes, and help these children and mothers to report and have this support”, she suggested. 

The violence in numbers

In 2020, the state of Rondônia accumulated 9,814 cases of domestic violence, according to the data from the Civil Police, with the majority corresponding to crimes of threat: 5,347. The crime of bodily injury was second on the list: 3,844 women were beaten by their partners or other family members.

In 2021, more than 2,300 women were victims of violence in the second quarter, from April to June. In the first three months of the year, there were 2,430 occurrences, totaling 4,808 cases from January to June. In Rondônia, the cases are divided by the categories of threat, defamation, slander, libel, injury and bodily injury.

“Among the effects of this for the victims, especially for their children, we have two processes: they can repeat this reality or they can build a process of psychological illness, because, today, neuroscience studies already show that children who live in violent environments and psychological vulnerability have, including a decrease in synaptic connections and a decrease in brain area. So, we are talking about a brain that will develop stressed, that will develop in intense suffering, which will leave this person more vulnerable to some mental aspects and disorders, as well as learning disorders and difficulties for life”, concluded the Master in Psychology, Gésica Bergamini.