It’s Friday. A group of young women in their early twenties are gathered outside their lecture halls, and while their heads are buried in their phones, the incessant pings are suddenly interrupted by a “hawn, kerha” (hey, ugly). By the time they look up, the wrongdoer is out of their eyesight. Later on that evening, the same group of ladies are at the club, dancing their stress away. The music is so loud their ears keep popping, so they’re paying very little attention to what’s happening outside of their circle. An onlooker brushes against one of the friends and touches her behind, an unwelcome gesture to which she screams and jolts forward, but her instant reaction is lost in the loudness.
Such incidents are way more common than we think, says Prof. Marceline Naudi matter-of-factly, and it’s this normalised sexism that makes gender-based violence seem inevitable. Prof. Naudi is an activist in this field, a social worker by profession, and an Associate Professor within the University of Malta’s Department of Gender and Sexualities. You can say her passion about social justice is unmatched, and this is evident in the pitch and strength of her responses.
Gender inequality and gender-based violence against women form a vicious circle, so the higher the violence against women, the less equal is the woman in that society, and vice versa – the greater the inequality, the higher the rate of violence.
There are a number of harmful attitudes, behaviours and stereotypes, which we absorb from when we are children up until the end of our life, which make it more likely for violence against women to be normalised and considered less unacceptable. And this is exactly why we should keep striving to eradicate gender-based violence – to challenge these ‘normal’ and widely acceptable ways of thinking.
Let’s stop thinking it’s normal. It is not ok.
Let’s unlearn that letting it go and not doing anything about it is acceptable.
For the sake of awareness, gender-based violence can be anything of a spectrum of things: it starts with this kind of harassment experienced in everyday life, a continuous dripping that has the potential to destroy self-esteem and self-confidence. On the other end of the scale is femicide, and in between is domestic violence, which can be of an emotional, psychological, physical, sexual and economic nature.
Because there is often evidence that is clearly visible to the eye, it’s the physical violence that is most often acknowledged by the general public as well as by the justice system, whereas all its forms can be traumatic and are harmful.
We also have to acknowledge that women do not all come in the same mould, so there are additional factors that make a woman’s journey to escaping violence more difficult – these would include disability, ethnicity, religion, sexuality – they can further aggravate a situation and make it more difficult to leave an abusive relationship or even just to speak up.
Malta has ratified the Istanbul Convention, which is considered the golden standard by the United Nations in this field, and the island has been monitored in terms of what it’s doing to prevent and combat gender-based violence.
An interesting find if you read through is that the professionals involved in preventing and combating violence against women receive minimal initial training. This insufficient training has serious ramifications, and it leads to interviewing victims in an insensitive manner, as well as creating barriers to reporting cases. This in itself also perpetuates certain stereotypes, and backfires more often than not in terms of the effectiveness it is meant to have on curtailing the number of incidents.
Zeroing in on the University, which we so often refer to as a community, I would say that, no, we aren’t sufficiently aware of the policies in place, which is why all of us have a duty to help increase awareness about gender inequality and gender-based violence.
On Wednesday 29 November 2023, students, academics, poets and activists, including Prof. Naudi herself, together with Prof. JosAnn Cutajar and Dr Clarissa Sammut Scerri, came together to collectively speak up and shed light on the prevailing critical issue of gender-based violence.
