Peasant men and women say ‘End Violence against Women!’
Press Release
(Harare, November 25th, 2017) On the occasion of the International Day of Struggle against Violence towards Women, La Via Campesina calls on all its organizations to carry out actions across the world to denounce, confront and break silence about the structural violence that peasant women suffer due to a capitalist and patriarchal society that violates us, discriminates against us, exploits, oppresses and assassinates us on a daily basis.
We are currently witnessing an imperialist offensive by capitalism, intrinsically related to the conservative and fascist patriarchy. They look to exploit our lands, territories and natural resources, in the same way that they want to exploit our work, our lives and our bodies. Peasant women have our rights violated every day in the countryside by transnational corporations. We are displaced, forced to immigrate due to social conflict and war, made vulnerable to prostitution, to human trafficking, sexual exploitation and also criminalized for resisting through our peasant movements. Added to this capitalist violence is the patriarchal violence in our homes, where peasant women suffer from physical, psychological and sexual aggression, often ending only with femicide, the rate of which grow exponentially from year to year.
In the 5th Women’s Assembly and in the 7th International Conference of La Via Campesina, in Bilbao in July of 2017, all the organizations of the peasant movement committed ourselves to implementing the Campaign Against Violence towards Women, which was created in 2008 at our 5th Conference in Maputo. The campaign has the objectives to make more visible the violence that rural women suffer, to denounce and, above all, to carry out actions in the effort to eradicate all forms of violence towards women that continues in our organizations and in the rural world. The campaign is a task of all of us peasants, women and men.
We reaffirm our collective commitment, as a global peasant movement with a feminist character, to struggle for gender equality, for the promotion and guarantee of the political participation of women in all the leadership roles and decision-making spaces of our organizations and to take on, in our practical, collective and daily actions, beyond mere discourse, the conflict to put a definitive END to all forms of violence against peasant women! On this November 25th, we commit to carry out actions in the framework of the Campaign Against Violence towards Women and we reaffirm our central struggle against the capitalist and patriarchal system, the enemy of our construction of a new society truly fair, based on equality among men and women and the construction of human emancipation.
No more violence against women!!
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