International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women :Statement of KNE on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women

Sexual violence and abuse – up to and icnluding rape and femicide – are only the tip of the iceberg of women’s inequality.

Let us think for a moment: What obstacles does a woman in the 21st century face when she tries to escape a violent and destructive relationship?

• Higher unemployment rates than men, intensified pressure and abuse from employers – for example the 13-hour working day law, which tramples on hard-won worker’s rights. At the same time, 30% of working women are only part-time employed, and 1 in 4 earn less than 5 euros an hour.

• Employer blackmail, threats and dismissals of pregnant workers. The systematic commodification of family care (care for children and other family members) creates a conflict between women’s right to work and the need for maternity protection – something which is viewed merely as a “cost” by the state and business groups.

• Class barriers and obstacles in education. Female university students are faced with the threat of expulsion, while almost 50% are forced to work alongside their studies just to cover the enormous costs of higher education – with rent alone reaching 600 euros a month.

• A state that operates based on a “cost-benefit” logic, loyally serving capitalist profitability. We are outraged by the acquittal of the police officer who responded to the appeal of 28-year-old Kyriaki, saying that “the patrol car is not a taxi”, moments before she was murdered outside the police station.

The insecurity arising from “flexible” work, from reduced income, from underfunded and commodified health and welfare services, from the deterioration of the working and living conditions – especially for working and unemployed women – ultimately forges the “chains” that restrict their ability to break free from toxic, abusive relationships.

We are strengthening the struggle against all the factors that leave women unprotected and exposed to multiform violence, but also against the condemnable anachronistic behaviors, patriarchal-type views at the expense of women, which survive as remnants of thousands years. The source of this discrimination is not the “male-dominated-patriarchal society”, as the system obsessively touts. Its root is the exploitative power, while its reproduction passed for years through legislation, education and religious dogma.

In the present increasingly reactionary character of capitalist society, necessary modernisations cannot achieve a generalised character, because the economical and societal coercion that women go through at work, in their family, in every aspect of social life, remain.

Today, too, supposedly “modern” but reactionary models of life choices that affect interpersonal relations are promoted through every “channel” of the system, school, university, social media, the cultural industry: competition, the egoistic way of life, individualism, the hunt for “happiness” through quick and “easy” riches, the devaluation of a person’s personality, even of life itself. They foster tolerance even towards extreme forms of exploitation and violence against women, like prostitution, commercialization of body and sexuality, surrogacy, the financial dependence of women on their sexual partners.

This rotten ground shapes personalities “capable” of committing heinous crimes and leaves women and even children unprotected.

We do not compromise with the absence of guarantees for the right to stable work, with a wage that allows a dignified life.

We do not accept the tragic lack of services and infrastructure for the comprehensive protection of women from multiform employer-led, state-led or societal violence. Any supposed “sensitivity” of the European Union, the bourgeois state, the governments to violence against women starts and stops at the limits of the “resilience of the economy”. They lavishly ensure billions of euros for military equipment based on NATO’s plans, for the war economy and preparation. Whereas at the same time they leave the operation of the infrastructure network in the balance, as the EU program, on which its funding depends, is ending.

We are intensifying the struggle to put and end, here and now, to the involvement of our country in the massacres in Ukraine and the Middle East, the dangerous plans of the USA, NATO and the EU for the interests of business groups. We strengthen the solidarity to the peoples who experience the horrors of war and life as refugees, like the heroic people of Palestine, with thousands of women and children among the victims.

In the “suffocation” generated by the system of exploitation, multiform violence and womens’ inequality, participation in the struggle for the liberation of women from every social inequality in the socialist-communist society is “oxygen” for every young woman.

The forces of the KKE and KNE play a leading role for the comprehensive protection of women from multiform violence in every place of study or work and every neighborhood. We fight to secure these financial and social factors so that women can have the potential to fend off violence of every form, being economically and socially emancipated.

The activity of the university students’ union and the school student council, the women’s associations of the Federation of Women of Greece (OGE), of the trade union, forms a “safety net” so that women can find courage, solidarity and the strength to militantly change their life.