La Voz de Galicia – May 27, 2022 →
It is impossible not to lose hope when things like these happen. Living in this environment makes one accustomed to draw from an external perspective to analyze things from the other side. But this week, with the shooting at an elementary school in Texas, with the multiple group violations in the Spanish state, one cannot stop thinking about the complex reality we inhabit on both sides of the Atlantic (and around the world). Evil has always existed–nothing of what we are living through is new. But there is something genuinely horrifying in the normalization of violence, especially in a generation that lives exposed to it, that has access to it at their literal fingertips, and that enjoys no filter to help it calibrate the images to which it has access.
Over the last few days, I read the information that ANAR (Help to Children and Adolescents at Risk) Foundation published in its annual report. A report that discusses, among other things, an 80% increase in cases of sexual abuse of minors, and the fact that 10% of these abuses are groupal. And I suppose that we will ask ourselves about the reasons for that uptick, and that each one of us will have a different answer. But the truth is that it is happening, and that something must be done to stop this both at social and institutional levels.
And then I think about the gun control conversation in the United States about what it means to limit access to weapons (there are states where a sixteen-year-old may legally purchase a rifle), and the number of lives that would be saved when guns are not on hand. And I think about what would be the limitation or equivalent legislation to stop this terrifying increase of sexual abuse of minors? Do we know what, exactly, we fight against?
