I'm not ashamed to admit

The "spanking law" that the Duma is preparing to consider will only legalize the order of things that has become entrenched in the minds of Russians: it's normal to beat your family

The State Duma has accepted for consideration a bill that provides for the decriminalization of intra-family beatings that did not cause harm to health. The initiative, known as the "spanking law", was met with fierce criticism from the public, and personally, for example, I have not yet been able to find a single remark in support of it. Well, really: which of the decent people will allow themselves to say that a slap in the face in the family or that notorious “slap” is, in general, not scary? What are you, this is completely unacceptable, etc. and so on.

But here I am, for example,

I don’t understand at all what will change in our country if this law is adopted. How many cases do we know of when a person was tried for allowing himself, so to speak, to “slap” his wife, mother, sister, child?

When discussing this law, the statistics of the Ministry of Internal Affairs are often mentioned, according to which in 2015 about 50 thousand crimes were committed precisely within the family - but who will tell us what percentage of them falls on routine, everyday domestic violence, which does not leave marks on the body of the victim, but turns her life to hell?

I have not been able to find such statistics, but I have my own, alternative.

Right now, two employees of my department - completely independently of each other - are trying to find a way to save two girls who live on different ends of the planet and endure those very “slaps” (although often everything goes much further).

I can’t talk about one girl, in the interests of her safety, and you know the other - this is Yulia, the heroine of Lena Kostyuchenko’s essay “The Gods of the Swamps Will Not Let No One Go,” published in Novaya in May this year. The essay, in fact, was not dedicated to Yulia at all. It was, strictly speaking, about the advance of civilization. The main characters of the essay, the Nenets, watch as their sanctuaries and temples, one after another, are ruined and discredited by the construction of another oil rig.

Well, among them was this girl, Julia. 23 years old, three children (eldest daughter from her first husband), no education, no prospects.

Yulia is strongly tyrannized in her husband's family. And they get hit often. She repeatedly tried to get away from her husband Tolya - but how far can you go with small children on the snowy tundra? Each time it was returned back, and everything started all over again.

Yulia tells Lena about her fate: “My father beats my mother. Always beat. Vika, Tolik's sister, was now beaten by her husband. Beaten very hard. The operation was done because her liver burst. She survived. There are terrible bruises on the neck.

It is unprofitable to let Yulia go to her husband's family - the child allowance will also go with her. And if a person disappears, freezes in the tundra - well, everything is the will of the swamp gods. Lena is very afraid that Yulia might one day “get lost” like this.

Our little and brave Kostyuchenko has already traveled to their wilderness three times in recent months, trying to invent a way to get Yulia out of her domestic hell. But you need money, you need shelter. In Beloyarsk, the city closest to them, there is no women's crisis center. There are such centers in big cities - but they don’t take Yulina’s story, no matter how much Kostyuchenko fought. “No crisis center has such opportunities, Ol. It's very far and expensive. No one will go there."

I say all this not to the fact that the law does not work in our country - who will be surprised by this? Another thing is worse: our public conscience does not work either.

In our country, domestic violence is the order of the day. Nobody is surprised by the order.

Doctors who sewed up the liver of the beaten girl Vika, neighbors, parents, guardians who regularly see these girls in bruises - no one, no one is surprised. And no one (well, except for the crazy Kostyuchenko) does not consider it necessary to at least do something about this. All these ahs and oohs about the “law on slaps” submitted to the State Duma - I think it’s a purely metropolitan reflection, it does not apply to remote territories, and, as we have seen, not a single crisis center undertakes to save a woman there - “far and expensive ".

Probably, someone will say that the story of the girl Yulia from the tundra is an extreme and exceptional case. Well, let's not lie. Everyone, I think, at least once in their life heard that such things happen to someone at home. But not everyone dared to intervene.

So the bill that we are now discussing so vigorously, I think, very accurately reflects our general mindset on this matter. No matter how humanists we portray ourselves.