The 25N has been for many years a day of action, rage and denunciation of the sexist violence that we suffer every day. The UN formalized that date as the anniversary of the murder of the Mirabal sisters at the hands of Trujillo, the Dominican dictator they challenged.
The figures of sexist violence increase year after year, but far from retreating, we take to the streets with increasing force to denounce and say Enough is enough! Our lives matter!
This year, the trend unfortunately increased considerably, because the response of capitalism to the Covid health crisis has generated more suffering and violence towards us.
The situation in the world
Across the world, women are unsafe. In the midst of the pandemic, femicides, rapes and domestic violence soared. During COVID-19 lockdown, many women are trapped in their homes with their abusers, while fewer shelters and services are available and friends and support networks are more out of reach.
The necessary suspension of in-person classes isolated thousands of girls and boys from school, leaving them without any possibility to report abuse or mistreatment within the family, which with the compulsory confinement increased.
Furthermore, the lack of legal abortion in most countries; its even more difficult access at this time of the health crisis where it is allowed; and the public policies to leave maternity challenges for those women who decide to become mothers.
The UN itself recognizes the seriousness of the situation. According to its latest report, violence against women continues to be a serious problem worldwide. “During COVID-19 lockdown, many women and girls have isolated themselves in unsafe environments where they are at increased risk of violence at the hands of their partner. Around a third of women around the world have suffered physical and / or sexual violence by their partners; and 18% have experienced this type of violence in the last 12 months. In the most extreme cases, violence against women is lethal: globally, an estimated 137 women are killed daily by their partner or a family member.
Half of the women in the world have no power to decide on the use of contraceptives, nor to refuse to have intimate relationships. Furthermore, the lack of legal abortion in most countries, its even more difficult access at this time of the health crisis where it is allowed, and the public policies to abandon maternity for those women who decide to become mothers.
Far from being a consequence of the current situation, violence against women is the expression of the decadence and barbarism of the capitalist system and its inability to guarantee equality, rights and the end of machismo and violence against women. The pandemic only aggravated an already desperate situation.
The bourgeoisie and its governments are accomplices of violence
The policies that some governments resorted to are totally insufficient, worse still those that have a denialist attitude to the pandemic did nothing and even many support programs and basic services were interrupted due to the chaos of the health system whether operating or not.
The United Nations estimates that $ 45 million are needed to fight back global gender-based violence during the pandemic, but not even 0.3 percent of that budget funded that purpose.
It is the most underfunded section, but the international institutions of the bourgeoisie and imperialism do not comment: the issue was not mentioned in the Policy Tracker of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), nor in the World Bank, nor in Social Protection and Labor Response to Covid-19 of the International Labor Organization.
The worsening of the economic crisis generated by governmental responses to the pandemic, brutally hit working women and aggravated the picture of violence and inequality especially for poor and black women. Currently over half of the world’s female population is unemployed, in places like South Asia, North Africa and West Asia less than a third of women are employed.
The pandemic and the overload of domestic tasks expelled women from the labor market, relegating them to more precarious jobs, increasing the wage gap between men and women.
Many work in the sub sectors most affected by COVID-19, which were affected by lockdown measures, including paid activities in domestic work, hotel and food services, and retail trade. Women are also on the front line in the battle against the pandemic, who account for more than 70% of healthcare workers, and face riskier situations than their fellow male workers.
Migrant women saw their situation worsen catastrophically. In many cases, expelled from the health system, excluded from the miserable financial “aid” and forced to catch the virus since many are domestic workers who in a precarious way continued to go to wealthy houses to work despite mandatory confinements. The vast majority were unemployed and had to resort to prostitution.
A separate chapter deserve LGBTI women who are discriminated against in the labor market, thrown into prostitution, which in this context of pandemic made them more impoverished and exposed them to even more violent situations than those they already have been living.
The social and economic consequences of this pandemic place working and poor women, especially if they are young, immigrants, racialized or LGTBI, in worse material conditions and with fewer resources to get out of an environment of sexist violence or get rid of any aggression.
The Covid crisis showed that we are not all the same in this system. Capitalist inequality and oppression were clearly exposed. The workers, the poor population, the marginalized and oppressed make the bulk of the dead. We bear the worst of it suffering hunger, violence, despair and everything for the capitalists to save their profits. Women, Blacks, immigrants, indigenous people, LGBTI and all the oppressed suffer it more. Strenuous work shifts are imposed on us, avoidable exposures to the virus, deaths in the streets due to not accessing health care, added to the sexist, xenophobic, racist and lgbtphobic violence of this system that divides and oppresses us to exploit us more and more.
The “empowerment” lie
While violence increases and we women throw ourselves into the streets en masse to fight, the narrative that the institutions build is that the way out for us is individual triumph and the rise of women to positions of power. Unfortunately, many organizations that claim to be feminists, and that some have even taken to the streets along with many of us, support and affirm this discourse.
The existence of women in the leadership of governments, in ministries, parliaments or company boards is an example of how the struggle in the streets pushes some prejudices, but does not give any fundamental solution against our oppression.
Kamala Harris, far from being a triumph for women, as progressives want to present her by being the first vice president in the United States, is a political reference of the capitalists, who will not hesitate to hang working women and men and blacks in pursuit. of big companies.
The decisions to close programs to assist violence, or to prioritize the budgets of “aid” to entrepreneurs before the emergency of the covid and the violence, have been made by both right-wing governments and those who present themselves as progressive and they even call themselves feminists.
Even the UN itself recognizes that its program “towards equal power and equal rights for women” is stagnant. There are only 20 women heads of state and although the number of female seats increased, they did not even exceed 25%, as well as in the business sector, women in the board of directors barely reached 18%. This discourse fails even for women who enjoy the privileges of the exploiting class.
Class unity to fight back oppression and exploitation
We are living very terrible moments, the Covid pandemic, the deepening economic crisis and sexist violence plague us every day. The governments of the bourgeoisie, whether of the right or “progressive”, made up of bourgeois men or women, show their total inability to give us an answer because they only care that the capitalists continue to win at the cost of millions of lives.
We bear the burden, we have tasks increased, we take care of the children, the elderly, the sick, we isolate ourselves with our aggressors, they continued to rape, kill or beat us because of our gender identity. We say enough is enough! We go out into the streets and we continue fighting.
We go out with African-American women in the US, we go out with the Chilean people who still want to change everything, we go out with the masses in Peru and Colombia, we go out in droves with Poles who want legal abortion, with people in Belarus who say enough is enough to the dictatorship.
We go out and we must continue going out with our class, with the millions of workers who no longer bear the burden that the rich want to place on their backs. We do not trust the feminine faces that they put in the governments, nor in the electoral traps that only favor the powerful.
We trust in our strength, in knowing that to put an end to sexist violence and oppression, we must fight against this system that exploits and oppresses us.
In the fight against machoism and oppression, we want and need the support from working men, because the machoism that oppresses, humiliates and over exploits women serves both to divide and weaken the class, and to increase the exploitation of all workers. In this sense, we are against all sexist perspectives contrary to the battle for men to break with their own machoism and join the struggle with us.
The struggle for our rights has to be of the entire working class, so that our coworkers also stop reproducing machoism and that our organizations fight back this scourge within our ranks so that we have a place in the common struggle. It is not a separate struggle but a joint one against machoism within our class. There is no way out to end oppression without overthrowing this capitalist system that oppresses and destroys us.
In order to have an emergency plan for sexist violence, we must fight back austerity plans and the governments that sponsors them. On 25N we will take to the streets, we will follow the anti-Covid19 orientations, but we will not stop demanding the right to live.
Stop machoist violence!
Stop oppression and exploitation!
Emergency plan to fight back Covid-19 and sexist violence! We demand guaranteed income and decent and safe accommodation for all!
Drastic increase in funding for Prevention, Attention and Protective Services for the victims! No debt repayment!
Long live the people’s struggle in the streets!
