Ana-Maria’s case has brought to the surface several systemic problems of society. It’s not just a case of kidnapping and murder of a woman. It’s a failure of the system to respond to the problem of violence against women and girls and to prevent such cases of exceptional gravity, said experts of the International Center “La Strada”, on whose initiative the awareness campaign “Denim Day” has been carried out in Moldova since April 2018,, IPN reports.
According to “La Strada”, for more than 30 years, in Europe and the U.S., the “Denim Day Campaign” is celebrated on the last Wednesday of April with the aim of raising awareness and promoting zero tolerance towards sexual violence.
The Centre calls on the authorities to take concrete and assumed actions to combat violence against women. It also calls for a clear analysis of the system’s shortcomings, based on data and evidence, as well as for fair, transparent and efficient justice in the case of Ana-Mari, the six months pregnant 19-year-old from Orhei who was found dead in a Telenești locality after getting into a car driven by a former policeman for a ride.
“We live in a society that becomes sensitive to the phenomenon of violence against women only in extreme cases. Unusual cases, such as Ana Maria’s, make us feel insecure. Any other woman could have been in Ana-Maria’s place. Violence against women is not a problem of women or of a closed group of women. We often hear from people outside the anti-violence community that this topic doesn’t concern them,” reads a press release.
According to experts of the Center “La Strada”, violence against women is a problem of the society we live in. It’s a problem that starts from ingrained attitudes and values, from the education we receive, from the patterns of behavior we see in society. It all starts from what people really think when they talk about women and girls, about the relationship between a man and a woman, and what violence is. And these values must be cultivated from childhood through systemic education centered on gender-based education.
The Center “La Strada calls for active actions to raise awareness of violence against women and girls, as well as to inform about national services to which cases of violence can be reported. It also calls for the revision of educational programmes by including subjects aimed at education for gender equality, harmonious and non-violent relations in compulsory educational programmes. Among the requests are also the implementation of programs to secondarily prevent violence against women through measures centered on sexual aggressors, as well as the development, implementation, evaluation of programs to reduce aggression and violence in order to change the attitudes and behaviors among aggressors, etc.
