A Global Call for Freedom and Liberation: End Gender-Based Violence

On the heels of International Day to Eliminate Violence Against Women, we are called to urgently center gender justice in our political organizing. This is not a distant struggle but demands committed attention and action at global, regional, and local levels. The 16 days of activism leading up to Human Rights Day on December 10th is a crucial period that demands that all women and girls, and indeed all persons of any gender, live free of abuse, fear, and violence of all kinds. 

It’s sobering and unacceptable that gender-based violence against cis women and girls remains one of the most prevalent and pervasive human rights violations in the world, as reported by the United Nations. The global estimate that 736 million women — almost one in three — are subjected to physical and sexual intimate partner violence, non-partner sexual violence, or both at least once in their lives is a stark reminder of the scale of this struggle.

Gender non-conforming people across the world face a unique set of risks of violence as they face exclusion, marginalization, and rejection by families and societies. They often experience higher rates of violence due to their non-conformity to traditional gender roles. In the US alone, the rate of violence against trans people is exceptionally high; they are four times more likely to be victims of violent crime than cis people. Black transwomen account for more than half of the victims, according to the US-based Human Rights Campaign.

During times of genocide, gender-based violence is pervasive within pre-existing gender inequality and power imbalances and usually worsens in the aftermath. Decades after the genocide in Guatemala, Indigenous women are still fighting for justice, accountability, and healing for the abuse they endured. Colectiva Actores de Cambio, a project supported by the Martín-Baró Initiative at Grassroots International, focuses on the transformative healing of Mayan women from traumatic experiences of sexual violence using Indigenous knowledge, ancestral wisdom, and feminist cosmovisions. This approach links the protection of their bodies with the protection of their lands and territories.

War and militarism are inherently patriarchal and capitalist systems of power and control for domination and abuse. Major human rights organizations have reported on the inhumane detention of Palestinian children and adults in Israeli military camps and detention centers, many of whom are arbitrarily detained and subjected to widespread physical abuse and sexual violence. Sudanese women recently committed mass suicide to escape rape in a genocidal war that continues to destroy territories and villages. Women and girls in Haiti face horrific sexual abuse with little access to the protection and care services they need. In the face of these atrocities and war crimes, social movements are demanding self-determination to create a society where the rights of women are respected as the leaders in the fight for sovereignty over their bodies and the liberation of their land. In Haiti, these efforts are anchored in a legacy of anti-colonial and anti-racist resistance to US imperialism and Haitian women’s roles in that struggle. 

There is a general understanding within popular and peasant feminisms that the root cause of gender-based violence is gender inequality throughout social structures, the persistence of patriarchal norms, and processes that reinforce strict gender roles and stereotypes that limit women’s and gender nonconforming people’s political power. It is unacceptable that women who still procure the majority of the world’s food endure the level of gender-based violence throughout the world’s societies, in rural areas and cities alike. La Via Campesina reminds us that women are responsible for 70% of agricultural production and 80% of domestic work. Along with off-farm labor, this amounts to a triple workload.

As those connected to social justice struggles, we must also hold ourselves accountable. The most challenging but critically important step is confronting the ways that people within movements experience gender-based violence. These experiences occur within a movement’s patriarchal structures and leadership, even as movements work for liberation, including gender equality and bodily autonomy. We must demand the same level of accountability within activist movements and take responsibility for creating liberatory spaces that do not replicate the systems we are organizing to eradicate.

La Via Campesina demands that “mechanisms must be established to fight patriarchy, promote gender equality, support victims and promote the participation of women and diversities in politics and decision-making spaces as a way to stop and dismantle patriarchy.” They declare, “neither women nor land are territories to conquer!”

Grassroots International joins social movements around the world to call out all forms of gender-based violence as part of the struggles against capitalism, patriarchy, racism, colonialism, and the advance of fascism.