What is the thing I do 360 times a year – in other words, almost every day? It’s not that easy to say. I probably cook, if warming up leftovers counts. I put my kid to bed, when I’m not doing any work events that collide with bedtime. Almost every day I have the urge to pick up a book, and almost every day I fail. I do my skincare routine, if it’s not one of those depressing days when I refuse to look in the mirror. I buy myself a pack of cigarettes. I call my friends. I laugh. I feel bad for not having quit smoking long ago. I take a walk.
But most definitely, I’ll be humiliated by a cisgender man shouting a slur at me on the bus, belittling my work, touching me without consent or making inappropriate remarks about my body – and I’ll choose to keep quiet about it. Peace of mind over a demand for basic decency.
Yes, this comes close to happening almost every day of the year. And every time I keep my mouth shut to avoid an argument, it seems another woman in Germany is being killed, most probably by her partner or ex-partner. It’s not that my speaking up against the daily humiliations could have saved any of these women, but I also doubt there is no correlation at all between the behaviour I have adopted as a kind of survival instinct, and the reality that more and more women don’t survive their relationships and breakups with men.
In Germany there were 360 femicides in 2023 alone, according to the federal criminal police office in a recent report. The statistic counts closed criminal cases, which are, by definition, “killings of women because they are women”.
Cases of domestic violence in Germany rose drastically during the pandemic, as they did elsewhere – but instead of returning to pre-lockdown rates they are still rising, even though women are not, at least in theory, confined to their violent homes any more. In practice, many German communes lack space in women’s shelters or the resources to help women who are financially dependent. The constant rise in rents, the still prevalent gender pay gap, the unequal division of care work – all these factors mean that many women simply can’t afford to leave their abusers. Where are they supposed to go?
A new law is at last making its way through the German parliament that could make things easier for survivors of domestic violence by obliging the state to build new women’s shelters and invest in fragile or nonexistent support structures across the country. The Protection Against Violence Act could and should pass before the end of 2024, since the general election in early 2025 will most likely result in a conservative-led federal government.
The feminist lawyer and author Christina Clemm, a firm supporter of the new act, points out that in regions with rightwing majorities in government, dedicated counselling programmes for domestic violence survivors could soon be closed down or substituted with family counselling.
Even with the so-called centre-left government we currently have, there seems to be little interest in prioritising women’s lives. Instead of acknowledging femicide as a massive problem for society as a whole, politicians from all sides tend to pay attention only when violence against women serves their political aims, namely: blaming foreigners, especially Muslims, for their supposedly misogynist worldviews.
Cem Özdemir of the Greens, for instance, the minister of agriculture, wrote an opinion piece for the conservative daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung recently. Özdemir, himself a son of Turkish immigrants if it matters, talked about his 19-year-old daughter’s worries about not being able to point out the misogyny she experiences from refugees and Muslim immigrants because she doesn’t want to be racist. Her father seemed to have no problem at all with affirming this one-sided image that every AfD campaign is built on. Neither did he hesitate to speak on behalf of a grown woman, instead of encouraging her or giving up some of his space so that she could share her perspective – and avoid being potentially misquoted in one of Daddy’s controversial little op-eds unrelated to his office or expertise.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m far from either romanticising minorities or belittling their structural issues in the belief that this is what anti-racism looks like. It doesn’t. I’ve been there, I’ve done that, and what I found out was that it only serves the men in these communities to uphold their power within them and further oppress the most vulnerable. However, the issue of femicide is bigger; it happens across cultures and classes. If we want to point out the intersections with migration, we should be more than concerned about how an asylum-seeking woman and her two kids, who lived in a women’s shelter in Hamburg, were deported last month.
I’m all for universalism. When it comes to patriarchal violence, we should not conceal its structural presence in certain communities just because they are vulnerable in other ways. But universalism goes in both directions. The fact that the next president of the United States behaves like an incel suggests we will need to intensify our survival strategies everywhere around the globe.
At a time when a man found liable for sexual abuse has been elected to the highest office in the west’s model democracy, don’t we need to go ballistic about every humiliation that men subject us to daily? Not because I won’t survive another unasked-for touch on my hip. But because every time this happens to me, I’m reminded that statistically, something much more awful is happening to another woman who won’t survive.
Fatma Aydemir is a Berlin-based author, novelist, playwright and a Guardian Europe columnist
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