Happy March 8 (I promise only to beat you tomorrow)

Today is International Women’s Day, March 8. Hallelujah.

This Soviet holiday is stupid. I put up this little post on Facebook nine years ago, but nothing that I have seen since then has made me like this day more. At best, it’s just another excuse for not working and getting drunk. At worst, it simply deflects attention from a battle that still, sadly, is very necessary.

First celebrated by minor socialist parties in the US, Germany and Denmark, soon Vladimir Lenin caught on to the idea, and March 8 became an important Soviet holiday, celebrated pretty much like today, with flowers and chocolate and endless salutations blabbered at any female you meet during the day.

Over the past 20-30 years, since the holiday has also become popular in the West, we celebrate “the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women,” says the United Nations. But why do we celebrate women’s achievements once a year? If anything those achievements should be drummed into school kids’ brains every day of the year. It makes no sense to have a holiday celebrating the achievements of half of humanity one day a year.

By now we have established that I do not care for this holiday, but I know that many of you enjoy it. So - while admiring the flowers and enjoying the chocolate, let’s use the occasion to take a closer look at the area where we – still, in fact increasingly – can observe the biggest, most important and ugliest difference between the sexes. I am, of course, talking about the most important right a person has: the right to live and live in safety.

The numbers for domestic violence in the former Soviet Union are just going up and up and up, year by year by year. Countless polls show that more than half the population in all countries in the region believe that domestic violence is a serious problem, but that their governments are not doing much to fight it, in terms of shelters, work with the police, education and information. I am aware that many Ukrainians dislike being ‘‘grouped’’ with other ‘‘former Soviet republics’’ - and there is no doubt that Ukrainian women are doing much better than the rest of the former USSR when it comes to equality in the workplace, salaries, education, etc. But when it comes to domestic violence, Ukraine sadly shares the pattern of regression. Although in Ukraine, at least, marches on March 8 are allowed, whereas in Central Asia, only Kyrgyzstan allows such a march. All other regimes in the region are utterly oblivious to women’s rights. Several countries have not even gotten around to criminalizing domestic violence. Research a few years back in Tajikistan revealed that 97% of men (and 72% of women) thought that “a woman must tolerate violence to keep her family together.”

In contrast to this, Ukraine has strengthened different mechanisms to counter gender-based violence. In 2017, Ukraine adopted legislation on combating domestic violence, introducing restraining orders, for example, and in 2021 the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, increased funding for shelters to help victims. More funds were pledged for 2022-24, but had to be diverted in favour of the war effort.

Officially, Ukraine reported that 74 women died in 2020 as the result of domestic violence in 2020, but in reality, the numbers are many times higher. Recently, Dmytro Lubinets, parliament’s commissioner for human rights, revealed the actual numbers. According to Lubinets and the United Nations Development Program, you need to multiply by almost 10: In Ukraine annually two million women suffer from physical domestic violence, and 600 Ukrainian women die from domestic violence.

This means that a Ukrainian woman is 12 times more likely to die at the hand of her partner as a woman in, say, Spain, and 7-8 times more likely to be beaten up in her home than a woman in Germany. The UN estimates that 3 million Ukrainian children witness domestic violence every year.

And with the war, numbers in Ukraine are spiking out of control, fear experts, as a TIME headline ran last year.

“Police recorded 349,355 cases of domestic violence between January and May of 2023, compared with 231,244 in the same period in 2022 and 190,277 in 2021. Experts say that the increase in domestic violence is a byproduct of war, and they fear that numbers will continue to climb as the war continues”, the analysis read.

In Russia, numbers are harder to come by as Putinism has long strangled independent research on such topics, of course, but seeing as Russian men already before the war were beating their “women folk” several times more than Ukrainian men, there is zero basis for believing that the situation in Putinia is any better. Putin (and the late Wagner mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin) released an estimated 100,000 of its most brutal prison inmates to go kill Ukrainians. It makes you shiver just to imagine what will happen when these brutes return to their families.

No amount of flowers, cheap champagne and pretending will do away with this horrific problem. It needs proper attention, education and funding. A start would be that we every March 8 keep the kids in school for a whole day focused exclusively on gender violence/education.

But, I guess, for now, at least three groups of people are happy today:

- the people selling flowers

- the people selling chocolate (for example a former Ukrainian president)

- the people selling vodka

So, happy March 8 - today we shall at least pretend [insert icon of a red carnation].

(Andersen)