Fifty women in our province were murdered last year by their partner or ex. A shocking and far too high figure. Ester Wijnen (52) from Den Bosch knows what it is about. For years she was mistreated and oppressed by her partner. But she survived. Recently this form of women’s murder has a name: femicide. And there is an exhibition about the Tilburg train station.
Ester slowly runs along the large panels with photos of victims of femicide. If she reads texts as “he preferred to put me in a cage”, she knows what it is about. “Women who are killed because they are women,” she emphasizes it again. Every eight days a woman is killed, about half of them by their partner or ex.
“If I can’t get her, nobody.”
Why? According to Ester, the woman runs the most risk when she wants to leave her violent partner: “From the urge to own her, he can think:” If I can’t get her, then nobody. ” And that very often leads to a horrible end. “
From her 24th to her 32nd, Ester herself was in a violent relationship. “It all started romantic, we would have a golden future. But then the first arguments came, blinds. Stuff flew through the house, I was physically tackled. ” Ester was blamed more and more often. She lists them one after the other: “It’s up to you. You need help. You don’t see it right. You are the problem. If you change, then it will be fine. “
More and more, Ester started to doubt himself. “That phase is the worst. I normally functioned on the outside. I came to work, had friends and I exercised. But in my head it was one big one mindfuck. At the end I lived on my gums, I thought I would not be there for long. “
“Then I felt: I have to go out here.”
Then a friend Ester asked for a volleyball tournament. That brought the turn: “For the first time in seven years I left alone with a friend. I had fun, he wasn’t there, nobody looked over my shoulder. Then I felt: I have to go out here. “
Waiting for privacy settings …
Yet Ester did not immediately take action. She had to determine a strategy how she would get away safely with the children. She wrote everything off in a letter from eight edges that her husband discovered: “Then the pleuris broke out. That’s a black hole for me. Then the misery started. Everything and everyone was called. I got rid of the path, wanted to help a family to damnation. I had to think very carefully how I moved out of it. I felt alone and ignorant. “
Eventually she got her ex so far that he started to help the divorce. But the misery was not over yet: “The psychological terror continued. Only seven years after my divorce, after another violent incident, at my home, where the children were, did I start working with a lawyer to escape his power. ” Yet Ester only feels safe since her youngest son turned 18, now five years ago. “Since then I have nothing to do with him anymore.”
“It’s a predictable murder.”
Ester wrote down her experience in the book ‘You are the problem’. According to her, that there has been more attention for femicide lately: “Because it is a predictable murder. It is in phases. And if we have more eye for that, we can be alert to signals and see the murder coming earlier. The more we know from it, the more we can look at each other. “
The exhibition about femicide at the Tilburg train station can be seen until 1 April.
Reference to other article
