Life before the Slapping Law
In a study done in Russia, they found that 36000 women are beaten by their husbands every day. Adding to that, a third of the woman beaten die from domestic abuse every year. It’s up to the imagination to tell if those numbers are accurate considering the over 70% of woman that don’t speak out.
This is before the “Slapping Law”, a law practically decriminalizing domestic violence, was introduced. So now the numbers could go up.
Before 2017, there wasn’t much of a law or any laws to do with Domestic Violence.
In 2016, before Putin was elected for a Third term, the first bill about Domestic Violence was being drafted. But he was soon elected and the bill all but failed. With his third term he brought his conservatism to the full extreme and a group group birthed from the same ideals called All Russian Parents’ Resistance.
The All Russian Parents’ Resistence is a third congress made to stop Russia from falling to Western ideals such as gay culture, adoption, and equality in a household. Recently they have come to the conclusion that three events are going to happen in the future: “a [‘hot’] war between Russia and the US, two nuclear powers, or Russia’s capitulation OR there will be a discussion between the US and Russia about how the US has to realize that Russia isn’t going to adapt to western ideals.
In shorter words, this Third Congress was formed to fight for the traditional rights of Russia which are under fire including: domestic violence and how it differs from punishing members of your family.
When Putin was re-elected for his third term, this Third Congress had a big part in depleting the then drafting bill for better laws against domestic violence.
They fought it saying that it damaged the traditonal russian family.
“I think they see the traditional family as a traditionally patriarchal family. What they are mostly implying is that this law takes away the man’s right to control his family members,” said Yelena Mizulina, the politician who drafted the new Russian domestic violence laws. She is the same woman that drafted the “gay propaganda” law in Russia and also believes that cell phones are the real cause of child abuse.
There is a trend in all of this and that is: Russia politicians warping the idea that any change to the culture will result in too much westernization of Russia. Therefore, spreading this idea that Russia’s own unique culture will be lost. Mizulina, Putin, and the many others may very well believe this to be true, but there are some things that, that idealism doesn’t make sense with. Domestic violence is not good, and no cultural traditions should be able to twist that fact. Stopping the mass murdering of women should be a priority.
Russia is not an extremely undeveloped country, but it doesn’t educate it’s people on laws that matter, and it’s priority to keep it’s culture and traditions alive has blinded the people to the real problem: Women don’t feel safe, cannot trust (even) the police, and feel they will never get help against their abusers.
