International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women

November 25th

Every year during the “International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women”, the UN and states around the world issue grand, flashy statements, launch campaigns and allocate budgets, to stop violence against women and girls, yet their record in doing so is dismal.

A quarter century after this international day was declared, violence against women is still rampant everywhere, from the heart of Europe and the US, to authoritarian regimes across the world.

Each year you find yourself sighing, “it's worse than last year.” Even the phrase: “stop the violence” has become a luxury in today’s global order. Just look at the wars raging across the Middle East, Palestine, Congo, Libya, and Myanmar.

Slavery has been openly revived; people are executed through religious, ritualised punishments; a serialised, online genocide is on plain view in Gaza, with women, children, and civilians as its main victims. The world today is running a tournament of cruelty, torture, killing, and terror.

The ruling ideology of States and Regimes everywhere beats the drum of fascism, racism, and collective cleansing. Systems that depend on endlessly reproducing violence on such a massive scale are simply incapable of fighting violence against women. Those who fund, support, and empower the most criminal, misogynistic forces, like the Taliban, the Islamic Republic, Jolani’s factions, and assorted dictators, can never possibly claim to oppose violence against women and mean it.

The constant struggle

Let’s be clear: every woman on this planet, and we as women activists in the UK, fight for every tiny improvement, every legal change that benefits women and all citizens. A central pillar of our demands is the constant, uninterrupted struggle to impose reforms on governments for all women, whether residents, migrants, or asylum seekers.

This daily, persistent work belongs to the women’s movement and to all movements that fight for equality and against discrimination.

Capitalism can no longer improve lives

But who looks at the world today and still believes that contemporary ruling-class capitalism has any capacity left, not only to improve the lives of women and the rest of society, but even to maintain basic living standards? Just look at the systematic hostility and violence of the UK state against migrants, and its ongoing refugee-cleansing policies.

Standing behind the violence against women are powerful economic, political, legal, and cultural structures. And unless these barriers are shattered, violence may fall in some places, for a moment, but it will never disappear.

The oppression of women, and the many forms of violence inflicted upon them, seems to be a structural necessity in a world built on inequality, discrimination, and exploitation. A world sliding openly and purposefully towards fascism, a force rooted in violence.

Revolutionary ideas

So today, anyone who truly wants to fight violence against women must think like and be a revolutionary, and must stand with the political left wherever they are. Maybe it’s time to look at Iran from its hopeful angle: the rise of a women-centred revolutionary uprising against one of the most violent dictatorships of our time; against a misogynistic apartheid order; against inequality, poverty, and corruption; against the very architects of this oppressive system. This is the real roadmap for confronting violence.

We need a bigger movement, global solidarity, and real planning for deeper change if we want to break the cycle of abuses.

It’s a hard choice. It’s frightening. But it has to be worth it. Women deserve a better life.

Halaleh Taheri, Executive Director and Founder of MEWSo.