A year has more international days than natural days. Some commemorations, however, should be present 365 days a year. This is the case, for example, of Children's Rights Day, which has just been celebrated. Or the Elimination of Violence against Women, which is celebrated this Friday, 25-N, with the support of the UN against “one of the most widespread and widespread human rights violations.”
The UN itself estimates that around the world some 736 million women, almost one in three, “are or have been victims of physical or sexual violence at least once in their lives.” One in three. There are other unfair situations, less lacerating but equally insidious, as a girl discovered in Catalonia in the sixties, when her brothers played while she cleared the table “because she was a girl.”
That girl is 69 years old today and denounces that “the courts are inhospitable environments for abused women.” Assumpta Rigol was a full (and now honorary) professor at the University of Barcelona, a doctor in Anthropology and a Mental Health nurse at the Clínic hospital. She has taught classes in these fields at the Faculty of Nursing and at the Faculty of Medicine. She has also published books and articles on gender and mental health.
Director of the equality commission of the Faculty of Medicine and member of the advisory council of the Generalitat on equality issues, this expert currently channels part of her concerns in favor of a better society in Hèlia, a non-profit entity, formed in 2008 by volunteers and professionals who offer support to survivors of sexist violence “until their recovery and empowerment.”
“When I retired, I thought I couldn't stay in a comfortable space. I wanted to continue fighting against sexist violence, an area that I have researched and written about. She knew about Hèlia's social project, which has received support from the la Caixa Foundation, and she shared her sisterhood because she is feminist, intersectional, and advises the victims of this scourge. I especially liked the Neighbors for Neighbors initiative.
Neighbors for neighbors? “Yes, it is a project that has ties with a Palestinian association that works in this area. Organize a support network for victims of gender violence so that it grows like an oil spill in neighborhoods of Barcelona, l'Hospitalet de Llobregat, Igualada, Reus, Tarragona... It builds emotional, empathetic bridges, without value judgments, from a perspective horizontal, egalitarian. Hence the name.”
For many women, she explains, “they do not receive all the resources that should be available to them. They can have public defenders and psychological therapies, yes. They also go to SARA (a municipal care, recovery and reception service against abuse). But there are other aspects that the administrations do not foresee.” For example? “They don't even know where to start if they are migrants, if they don't speak the language, if they are alone or with children.”
Any simple procedure means climbing Everest. “Open a bank account, go to the doctor, to the court to file a complaint or to the agreed place so that your ex, your abuser, has the children on the days that correspond to them. How do you do it if you are alone, without help, without references, without someone to accompany you as an equal. Hèlia tries to be that outstretched hand. 'Without you I couldn't have done it,' they tell us so many times."
And who says it? “I remember an abused woman who went to court with her children. She had no one to leave them with. How do you go to trial? How do you find out if you have to be aware of them in a space that is also inhospitable? If someone accompanies you, if they can stay with your children, everything is easier. And the same thing happens in hospitals. ‘If she had come alone with my baby, she would have left me by now,’ one told me in the waiting room.”
“I will never forget another anecdote in a bank. She accompanied a woman who had to open an account, but they asked her questions that she did not understand. How do you give the name of the street of your penultimate residence if you have arrived here as an asylum seeker and can only answer: 'In a tent on a lot converted into a refugee camp.' In those moments you need someone by your side to help you. We do it.”
The majority of the beneficiaries are migrants (from Asia, America, Eastern Europe...), but that does not mean that there are no victims born here because, says Assumpta Rigol, “sexist violence is structural, it is part of patriarchy. It affects us all. Today it can be me. Tomorrow... This is another reason for my volunteering. This is not just the cause of women. In reality, it is a human rights cause.”
Despite all the progress, invisible structural violence persists. “If this violence affects me, at least I have friends and support. But if you come from outside, the usual thing is that you don't have anything. The escape from the abuser and refuge in a foster home is always a horror story. And even more so if you have been isolated. “I know women from Pakistan who came for family reunification and who didn't know anyone.”
“It is not that because they are migrants they suffer more sexist violence. They suffer the same, but they are more defenseless. They are more vulnerable because they have no family or resources," explains a 69-year-old woman, but with the same rebellion as when she was a child, the only girl of three brothers, and saw injustices that bothered her "at home, at school, in the games". Or that she didn't understand why cojonudo and coñazo were antonyms.
An admirer of the writer Simone de Beauvoir and the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, Assumpta Rigol has been passionate about many novels. In particular, Infinity in the Palm of the Hand, by Gioconda Belli, which subverts the story of Adam and Eve. And A Room of One's Own, by Virginia Woolf, which denounces that many women “do not have their own space, not even in their homes. Except, of course, the kitchen and laundry room.”
