How does a child see and experience male violence? This is the activity that the story contest Asun Casasola has put to adult writers this year, “because women who suffer violence are not islands, what happens to them also influences their environment; we wanted to make public that violence affects the whole of society”, says Ainara López Zarco, the organizer of the competition. The papers presented mainly focus on domestic violence: in houses where there is violence, there is talk of the dark and harsh reality that the youngest have to endure in daily life. In short, children are direct victims of violence suffered by their mothers, as we explained in this report.

Children who don't understand what happens to their friend or to the girl who doesn't let her play in the yard, also present stories pulling from him. “Violence crosses us and proof of this has been this year’s edition, children also suffer violence in one way or another,” says López. “If the machismos that cross us in daily life are not identified and worked, they are repeated inexorably because they are not only ‘adult’, but from the whole society.”

And from the kids' eyes?

What should boys or men do about male violence? This is the theme of the story contest for writers up to 16 years old in the youth category. In order to transform the reality we live, we need everyone’s eyes and forces and we wanted to stress – as Ainara López explained – the importance of the role of young boys and girls. Girls and women are called at all times to identify and report violence, many empowerment exercises are put in place both in schools and outside of schools, but boys have a lot to say and we have to provide them with tools to act in the face of aggression, to become allies, to approach the fight against violence and to interact together.”

Asun Casasola, referent to a struggle

Jose Diego Yllanes killed Irundarra Nagore Laffage in the Sanfermines in 2008 for refusing to do so. Asun Casasola, a relentless wrestler who denounces what happened to her daughter, bears her name in the storytelling contest, which she will attend for another year. The competition also aims to “make visible the work that Asun does”: “It is a reference for us, another side of feminism that has transformed Asun, his pain and anger into transformers; he only knows how many kilometers he has traveled through center. We are all Nagore and we are all Asun, Asun forces us to join forces to identify and transform violence among all.”

Collective exercise

The short story competition Asun Casasola celebrates its eighth edition: “It is a difficult exercise what we propose; writing on a single page on a particular subject is not a cough of midnight of the goat”, and at the same time, Ainara López tells us that putting before paper and writing with violence opens up paths for reflection, denunciation and transformation. In this last edition a total of 370 stories (in Basque and Spanish) have been gathered that continue to feed the goal set in the implementation of the competition: “To carry out a collective exercise that aims to help represent lives without violence”.