International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women – physical violence usually begins with years of psychological terror!

Since 1999, November 25th has been the United Nations’ International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. The goal is to combat all forms of violence against women and girls worldwide and to raise awareness about the issue.

Violence can take many forms. Not only physical violence, but also threats, insults, harassment, and control by a partner are possible examples. Women and girls of all social classes and ages are affected. For those affected, violence can have severe consequences.

In many EU states, while the situation is better according to the index, women are still not adequately protected from violence. Therefore, in March 2022, the EU Commission proposed treating gender-based violence as a “particularly serious crime with a cross-border dimension.

Germany ranks 11th out of 140 countries in the index. However, even here, every third woman becomes a victim of physical and/or sexualized violence at least once in her life. The legal handling of killings of women and girls due to their gender – known as femicides – is also controversial. Statistically, every third day, a woman in Germany dies at the hands of her partner or ex-partner. However, femicide is not yet a separate criminal offense in Germany. Therefore, most killings related to separation are prosecuted as manslaughter. Killings resulting from a separation are thus punished less severely – contradicting the Istanbul Convention of the Council of Europe, to which Germany legally committed itself in 2018. This is one of the reasons why the Council of Europe criticized Germany in October, among other things, for its deficiencies in protecting women from violence. Additionally, it called for an expansion of counseling services and women’s shelters. So far, there has been no national action plan for combating violence against women. Federal Minister of Justice Buschmann from the FDP announced a first step towards combating misogynistic violence earlier this summer: “Gender-specific” and “directed against sexual orientation” motives should have a punitive effect in the future.