Victims tell: – “Resolving violence takes a lifetime”

Ana (name modified by editors) was beaten by her mother as a child. To this day she still doesn’t know why, she explains at the women’s table of the Neighborhood Without Partner Violence (StoP) project. When she finally had the courage to confide in other family members, all they said was that she deserved the beating and wasn’t good enough.

They even told their mother that her daughter was telling lies about her, which was followed by more beatings. “It was very bad for me that no one believed me,” says Ana, who is now over 50. At the age of 18 she ran away abroad, it was her “salvation”. Her mother denies the violence to this day.

Mental disease
Maria (name changed by the editors) has experienced something similar. She saw the violence from multiple angles: the mother beat the children, the father was subjected to violence at his workplace – a bar – and attacked the mother herself. In addition, there were derogatory comments about women, saying that there was no trace of appreciation in their place of origin. There was also no help.

“Dealing with violence takes a lifetime,” Maria (60) knows today, who left her home at the age of 17. At the time, she was severely depressed and anorexic, and by the time she was 30, she had made four suicide attempts. The sister became psychotic, the brothers fled to alcohol, one beat his own wife.

From victim to perpetrator
Meanwhile, she sometimes sees this brother – Maria has five siblings – as a victim of violence. A lot is passed down from generation to generation, it takes time to process trauma. At the age of 60, Maria is still in therapy. Ana also has days when things don’t go well for her, incidents in the neighborhood remind her of her own experiences. She recently rang a neighbor’s door asking for sugar after hearing screaming. The police have questioned her as a witness, Ana has made the neighbor an offer to talk and now wants to listen further.

Such neighbors would have helped her and Maria. At this point, Maria objects that she always thought violence only affected certain social classes. She now has an afflicted girlfriend who herself has a PhD and is married to an academic. For example, he wouldn’t let her go on vacation or meet friends. Maria encouraged her friend to seek help from institutions and referred her to relevant offers.

Violence has many faces
These examples make it clear that violence has many faces, including psychological and financial aspects. A participant in the women’s table who works as a consultant reports that some men with a migration background have forbidden their wives to work and/or have confiscated their debit cards. She encourages these women to become more confident and stand up for themselves. They also try to motivate them to seek help despite possible prejudices, for example at a women’s shelter.

Ana, Maria and the other participants also agree that violence cannot only be combated individually. The problem needs to be addressed by society as a whole. They think, for example, of violence prevention as a school subject, of an obligation to participate in workshops such as gender-sensitive boys’ work and of the fact that mental health should receive more attention.

“If you are in bad shape, you don’t get that kind of support. You have to be able to work. It’s quite difficult with illness and it’s still taboo to tackle violence (…). The consequences are frightening,” explains Maria It could help to change the image of both women and men, so that boys and men, for example, do not always have to be strong.