Violence against women is a broken mirror in the collective memory of humanity: when it breaks, its sharpness is not directed at women, but at human beings themselves. Looking into this mirror, society sees its own distortions in the darkness of violence, but often chooses not to pick up the pieces of the mirror, but to turn off the lights.
Where there is violence, the word dies, because violence begins at the point where it breaks its own language. And when the language is broken, not only the woman is silent; compassion is silent, the mind is silent, conscience is silent, freedom is silent. The voice that remains is only a musty wind passing through the heart - cold, foreign and not even one's own. However, a woman's voice is the finest balance of the universe, and when it is silenced, even the rhythm of the universe is disrupted, and a woman is both the remembering side of life and the reminder. When she is silenced, humanity loses not its voice but its memory. Because the freedom of women is the cleanest sentence humanity has ever written to itself. In fact, violence against women is not an overflow of power; when people do not dare to recognize the darkness within themselves, they try to wrap the chains of that darkness around the wrists of others. At that moment, one strangles one's own humanity, not someone else's freedom.
The question of philosophy is this:
“Why do we need to suppress a person's existence?”
The answer to this question comes from the history of fear in the face of power. That is why the language of violence is not the language of power, but of the lack of power.
True power begins by recognizing the emptiness within oneself, not by stifling the freedom of another. However, the mind that resorts to violence, instead of confronting its own inadequacy, seeks to extinguish the light of the other woman. Therefore, violence against women is not a simple social defect; it is a sick alliance between man and his inner darkness. Every violence perpetrated by man against man is a rupture. But violence against women is like a collective crack in the mirror of humanity.
This crack grows as we ignore it; as it grows, it wounds not only the woman but also the soul of society with its sharp edges. Instead of confronting the emptiness within oneself, man thinks he exists by breaking someone else's freedom. The man who breaks the woman to escape his own lack has silenced not the voice but the memory of humanity. .
It is important to know that the real target of violence against women is not the woman, but the desire to kill the good in the human person. That is why every trace of violence is the heaviest seal that humanity puts on itself. That is why violence against women is not only a crime, but an ontological betrayal: It is the misguided attempt of the mind to complete its own existence by trying to diminish another existence.
Every violence against women is a silent dark well opened in the heart of humanity; it is not water that falls into it, but conscience.Violence is not the language of power, but of fear hiding in the shadow of power.When humanity is tested by the pain of women, history loses its sun and turns into an evening illuminated by wounds.When the voice of women is silenced, the world forgets not to speak, but to understand.The destiny of a society is written not in how it touches its women, but in how its women can exist without being touched.
Eradicating violence against women requires a transformation not only of laws, but of thinking, language and habits.
Real change begins the moment a society recognizes women as an equal and full subject, not as “an entity to be protected”.
And perhaps most importantly:
The end of violence is not the moment when women are liberated; it is the moment when man makes peace with his own conscience and morality. And the moment man makes peace with himself, he stops betraying.
Guest Author: Gürsel Karaarslan