On Friday, March 20th a 34-year-old man, Péter H. stabbed his 90-year-old grandmother with a knife several times, then killed her with a hammer in the Southern Hungarian village of Edde. The woman died on the spot. On Monday, March 23rd the man was arrested.
The police revealed that the man had asked his grandmother for money, but she refused to give him any. They started an argument and the grandson killed her. Then he immediately phoned his family, who called the police.
An acquaintance told tabloid paper Bors that the perpetrator visited his grandmother every week, “usually to ask for money, but he also stayed to talk.” People who know them claim that the victim and the perpetrator “loved each other”, and the grandson “was not a problem guy”.
Such sentences can often be heard and read in the media in relation to cases of domestic violence. It is important to underline, however, that the perpetrators of domestic violence mostly directed at women are usually not mentally disturbed men suffering from psychic disorders, and most probably the reason Péter H. killed his grandmother was not, as Bors cites a friend saying, that “he had gone crazy from all the studying”.
A common thread in such cases is that the perpetrators believe in the inferiority of women; they consider women their property, so they think it is acceptable to treat them as they wish. They cannot accept that women should have their own will or wish to be independent of them. So these murders are not unique cases but prints of the same systemic problem: capitalist patriarchy, where women are in an inferior position in relation to men.
In 2020, according to press reports, the victim of Péter H. is the fifth woman in Hungary who has been killed by a close family member. The actual number is probably much higher; in 2019 the press knew about 21 such cases of femicide, whereas in response to an official query the National Police Headquarters responded that in fact there were 36 cases last year when a woman was killed by a family member or relative.
