At 9:26 p.m. on Wednesday (24), Christmas Eve, I was pouring myself the second glass of sparkling wine of the evening when I felt my cell phone vibrate. A notification of Leaf appears on the screen: “FEMINICIDE: After 25 days of hospitalization, Tainara dies, who was knocked down and dragged for 1 km by her ex”.
Before talking about his death, I wanted to talk about his life. Like me, you were the mother of two young children aged 7 and 12. You were 31, seven younger than me.
So far we know biographical tidbits about Tainara. She lived alone with the children. He did his best to create them. I worked in the e-commerce industry.
A few days ago her mother gave an interview to GloboNews betting that Tainara would be happy again, you can bet. She promised to be “his legs”.
Dona Lúcia’s daughter had both legs amputated because a man ran over her with a car. Douglas Alves da Silva is now accused of femicide, suspected of having killed Tainara for not accepting that she no longer wanted him.
“I remembered her, teaching her to walk,” her mother told the station. “I’m going to be her legs. She’s got a lot of love, she’s going to get a lot of affection from us, from her friends, from her family. She’s going to be happy again.”
Lúcia used social media to update her daughter’s health. In one video, after one of the five surgeries Tainara underwent, she was confident: “God is wonderful in our lives.” Everything had gone well. The girl was still intubated and sedated, but “she managed to open her eyes and look at me, like she was saying, ‘Mom, you’re here.’ It’s still there. He never left his daughter.
Tainara died on the eve of this date which, for many of us, Christian or not, symbolizes hope and peace. The news reached us through a new post from Lúcia: “Hello my loves, good night. It is with great pain that I come to tell you that our little warrior Tay has left us.”
His daughter, he said, “has just left this cruel world and is with God.” “It’s immense pain,” but at least the suffering has stopped. “Now it’s time to seek justice.”
We all take hundreds, if not thousands, of photos with our cell phones. We never think about who will be chosen to represent us in our death, especially if we are young, and dying seems to be something so distant, almost abstract, to when we are old ladies.
One of the portraits of Tainara reproduced around the world shows her crouching on a railway track, wearing sunglasses framed by bangs, a black jacket and a small smile on her mouth. She is young and she is beautiful.
For many women, the path taken early on is a statistic. We are the target of violence that is neither random nor exceptional, but predictable and socially tolerated. And this is uncomfortable because it denotes what many prefer to treat as an individual deviation, when in fact it is structure.
Femicide is rarely a starting point. Before him, there are many stages that rape women little by little, day by day. Each stage produces a kind of death in life: the loss of autonomy, the constant fear, the body that no longer fully belongs to you.
Murder is usually the final act of ongoing torment and is often compromised by friends who notice abuse and remain silent, by loved ones who look the other way. Better not to get involved.
A violence that society learned to minimize while there was still time to put an end to it. And there is no social class, no race, no ideology. It can even come from men who present themselves to the public as allies of women, accumulating digital cookies with feminist speeches, while in private life they erode self-esteem and exercise control out of fear over their exes and current partners, over the mothers of their children.
The following story, from the 1980s, is attributed to writer Margaret Atwood. She asked a friend why men feel threatened by women. After all, they were almost always physically bigger and stronger, and historically better paid and more powerful.
The friend replied: men are afraid that women will make fun of them. The author of “O Conto da Aia” then asked the same thing to university students, exchanging signals. And they replied that they were afraid that the men would kill them.
Tainara’s death on Christmas Eve reminded us that there is no truce as long as gender-based violence is a subject that only mobilizes women. Now is the time to seek justice, little Tay warrior.
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