About 15 thsds of women annually die from home violence – Metropolitan Hilarion
Moscow, December 23, Interfax – The Moscow Patriarchate urges society and authorities to consider scales of violence in Russian families.
“Scales of home violence are impressive: about 15 thousands of women a year perish from hands of their husbands or cohabitors. This terrific statistics is only the top of the iceberg: great amount of women, children and old people become victims of physical and psychological violence in family,” head of the Synodal Department for External Church Relations (DECR) Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk said in his address to participants of a round table on problems of home violence held in Moscow.
He stressed that family was urged to be “a school of bringing up a personality and true human unity,” it is in the family that “love of husband and wife, love of parents to children and children to mother and father harmonically combine.”
“That’s why, we, Christians, should be concerned with manifestations of home violence. We can and should tell our society today that a problem of home violence is not a private problem of certain families. Fundamental links between family and society give ground for bringing the problems of family, including problems of home violence, to the judgement of society, for making them a subject of public discussion and object of state care,” he further said in the address.
The Metropolitan believes “constant violence in families against its weakest members” witnesses to “the deepest spiritual and moral crisis,” the DECR website reports.
