The Guancha It barely exceeds 5,500 inhabitants, a small town closely linked to the primary sector, with traditional work and the customs of yesteryear, mostly dotted with behaviors and thoughts very far from the equality policies that today thrive in most corners of our national geography.
Coinciding with the celebration of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, the Guanchero City Council has designed a new space for social gathering, with activities, workshops and events around the necessary awareness, visibility and rejection of the sexist scourge that It continues to roam freely through the homes, streets and various spaces of our daily coming and going.
Under the title “Against sexist violence, count on me”, the Department of Equality and Gender Violence Policies, directed by María Jesús Vargas, offers one more year, and there are now five under her direction as the head of the Area, a program of acts and symbolic actions in favor of tolerance, freedom and respect between the sexes, and as a formula of unmitigated rejection of barbarism, hatred and physical, psychological, sexual and emotional violence towards women.
La Guancha is a municipality that stands out in the fight against sexist violence. What steps have been taken in recent years to improve the action of the local Administration in this regard?
Since I took office as Councilor for Equality and Gender Violence in 2019, I have not stopped working on the design, organization and materialization of projects and initiatives in favor of a feminist municipality, free of sexist attitudes and positioning. It has been and continues to be a difficult path, a battle with many open fronts because we must not forget that everything begins in the values, attitudes and behaviors that we see and accept as “normal” from a very young age, both at home and in our circle of friends and family. in the spaces where we are growing and maturing.
In these last four years we have grown and advanced a lot under the umbrella of the Network of Municipalities for Gender Equality of the North of Tenerife, an entity that La Guancha co-founded and through which we have shared many actions and common objectives with the rest of the towns on the northern slope. We assumed its technical secretariat in March 2021 and currently work side by side in the development of workshops, conferences, conferences and many other measures to combat gender violence. Another important step was our inclusion in the State’s VioGén System, for the protection of victims of sexist violence, both women and their sons and daughters. With this action protocol we managed to considerably improve the monitoring and protection of families threatened and stalked by their abusers in our town.
Through the State Pact against gender violence we have managed to carry out many other awareness-raising, information and training actions on equal opportunities and treatment between men and women, especially focused on the detection and correct action in the face of violence against them. I remember some multidisciplinary sessions on victim care at the Training Center, or the countless activities in educational centers, promoted in close collaboration with their directives. The work with the Gender Violence Unit of the Government Subdelegation in Santa Cruz de Tenerife has also been very intense and fruitful, with permanent monitoring of the cases and interventions around this problem.
Underlines collaborative work with educational centers in this fight against sexist violence
I underline it and put it in capital letters and bold because it has been and is an unbeatable work, an absolute predisposition of the management and the educational community as a whole in each of the campaigns that we design to combat machismo, to denounce the violence of gender and all its consequences. Both at the IES La Guancha and in the schools of the municipality we have great allies that allow us to reach schoolchildren, those generations that arrive stomping and that we need to train with love and maximum tact so that inequality and mistreatment of women does not exist. in their way of life.
Our work in educational centers is essential to guarantee the success of the work. It is more complex with older people, in the town’s senior citizens’ associations, because people with a life already covered, as I said before, normalize certain behaviors and attitudes that for us are totally incomprehensible and intolerable. Many are women who experienced deep machismo firsthand, a social and family patriarchy that we will hardly be able to erase from their way of interpreting rights and opportunities between free and equal people. Even so, our fight for a more just, respectful and sexist-free society continues.
What problems do you detect regarding sexist violence in the municipality?
Well, they are not few. The normalization of violent attitudes among young couples is a very worrying reality. The consumption of pornography from a very early age and the approval of certain sexual practices that humiliate and denigrate women is also a terrible problem among our young people. We have to work on prevention, promoting investments in this line to prevent these types of inappropriate habits and behaviors from ending up being accepted as appropriate in the daily lives of our boys and girls.
We are a people who continue to be afraid to report, although that fear is disappearing over the years, thanks to the empowerment of women, the work of the City Council, feminist entities and groups, and the support and protection of those who speak out. voice and lend their shoulder without complexes.
What actions have you designed to celebrate 25N this year?
We maintain the line of previous editions, with a violet butterfly as the protagonist of a set of events that will take place until next December 19, with the celebration of the play “Sor Juana”, by the Gaviera company. We have placed the traditional commemorative ribbon for the International Day against Gender Violence, both on the façade of the City Hall and in different public spaces throughout the local geography. We illuminate the exterior of our town hall with the color of the theme throughout this week, as a sign of commitment and fight against sexist violence in all its forms.
In this edition we have the exhibition “History of the awareness campaigns against violence against women of the Government Delegation for Gender Violence”, and the workshop “Indicators of abuse in relationships between couples”, led by Antonio Perdomo, from the Care Service for victims of sexist violence. A night route through “La Laguna Oculta” or our participation in the march promoted in Los Realejos by the Red del Norte complete the program of this edition, which also includes the reading of the manifesto prepared for this edition, as well as a minute of silence as a sign of respect towards the victims of gender violence.
