Oh, come on ladies, come on children, what’s so hard in a little quarantine? You just have to stay inside. You can keep that up for one or two YEARS.
Only the most vicious homebodies say that the measures taken in spring following the appearance of the corona virus were not exaggerated or disproportionate. Let’s speak clearly: prohibitions, closures, bans, these are not “precautions”. I expect that one day, in a few decades, a leader of the capital will put it in their memoir, in a timid little footnote, in parenthesis that “we shouldn’t have closed down Margaret Island” and that “complete families cannot be locked in their concrete slab flats without letting them at least go down to the park”.
It is ancient, tossed aside knowledge that horizontal is not necessarily fair. The water level that rises just up to my neck may be enough to drown somebody else. Everybody was sent home the same way - just not to the same homes. Yes, a lockdown may even have a positive side to it, when daddy is in home office, and mommy is building her career in a downtown, high-ceiling, multi-room apartment, with bookshelves from floor-to-ceiling and a full fridge buzzing away. There’s finally time to play board games and sing nursery rhymes with the little munchkins; we can watch movie classics again on the ginormous flat screen; and of course, the leaven is puffing along, transverse muscles are stretching with an online yoga class, and I learned ten new words in Norwegian today. An idyll, totally instagrammed.
Except, when daddy is beating up mommy.
Except if daddy lost his job last March, and has been making money from loans or odd jobs at best, but mostly stays at home drinking. Except if a family of five is crammed into one and a half rooms, and the online learning of the children is supposed to be ensured by one rattling, sluggish laptop, and some vague memories from the parents’ school years. Not that I would be capable of offhandedly taking the finals on, let’s say, dicots or the covalent bond.
Please stay at home. Those uncompassionate, poser members of a class born into a good place have been plastering this passive-aggressive imperative on their profile pictures for almost a year now. Please? Home? With a black eye, broken bones, being choked or raped? Why please, and what is home? And if I ask, we’ll be right at a point when they say it has nothing to do with lockdowns, the abuser should make an effort because there is an epidemic going on. That’s how it goes, sure. Behold, those in the west, even in faraway European cities, they can write down wisely how the Hungarians should manage their lives down in the hood. My favorite is, when they do it believing they’re some kind of opposition heroes, even though they support the government’s policy of prohibitions and closures, in fact, they radicalize. The Istanbul Convention is important but today it is much easier to demand the proposals and ratification of its distant and indirect solutions than admitting: lockdown, for many, means being locked inside with the abuser.
All the while, Fidesz has been advertising how lockdowns have in fact reduced crime. Yeah right, it’s definitely therapeutic against theatre coat theft when theatres are banned. No bars, no bar fight, right? Zero joints were seized at festivals last year, as there were no festivals. Just in case, a “crime map” was prepared, that showed the effects of the November lockdowns on criminality. A decrease can be seen in the specified crime categories: in the number of vandalism, public disturbances, car thefts, robberies or offences committed in public areas - the police however did not consider it important to show how lockdowns affect what happens within the walls. Because their map doesn’t show the number of domestic abuse and homicide cases. Opposition politician Bernadett Szél collected the data herself that were scattered over the website of the Ministry of the Interior to clear up what the situation is.
THERE WERE 65% MORE DOMESTIC ABUSE OFFENCES IN HUNGARY REGISTERED IN 2020 THAN IN 2019, WHICH IS ALMOST TWO THIRDS MORE.
And these are “just” the registered cases, the ones whose news, one way or the other, got out from behind the closed doors. There is huge latency in these cases. Let’s just say this outright: today, a 24-year-old woman is much more in danger of to her aggressive partner getting drunk than contracting the corona virus. It is also a fact that all the unnerving headlines have been pumping the panic-pedals with “it is now dangerous to children” and “it mutated so badly that it’s mostly dangerous to children now” in vain - last year in Hungary not one child under 14 died infected with the corona virus. In fact, we only lost a total of two severely ill kids under 19. We are truly sad for these two as well, but all the while, a child is beaten to death every month due to domestic abuse. These young people are not threatened by the virus, they are threatened because we closed the doors on them. The elite are washing their hands of this. Moreover, sanitizing them.
I have no idea how long this can go on.
(Translated by Dóra Horváth)
