Feminicide

Today, we live in a world in which harassment, sexual assault, rape, violence and the murder of women have become commonplace, and in which women and communities face systematic annihilation.

As women become more visible in the public sphere, become more educated, and are better able to defend themselves, and the more they organize to struggle, they become the objects of the rage of the male-dominated capitalist system and the patriarchal-minded powers.

In recent years, the concept of “feminicide” has been proposed by Latin American feminists, with the demand that violence against women, especially murders, should be viewed as gender-based murders and that efforts to stop and sanction them should be developed accordingly.

Of course, it is important to acknowledge that women are exposed to violence because they are women and that this violence is increasingly evolving into a form of systematic annihilation. This is at the same time also an important step for the development of preventive measures.

With the effect of women’s freedom struggles that rise all over the world, from local to global, consciousness is rising everywhere. Women‘s awareness of their own value, as well as their ability to struggle together, shoulder to shoulder, for their rights scares the patriarchal mentality. As this mentality fears, it assaults, inflicts violence, oppresses, and massacres.

Although this mentality tries to portray violence against women as an attack on individual women, in reality, it aims to silence all women and control their bodies and even their minds.

Indeed, violence is among the causes as well as the consequences of gender inequality. It is a tool used by those, who benefit from gender inequality, while also constituting one of the founding elements of this inequality. There is a systematic role of oppressing and controling women’s labor, bodies, and identities – in other words, violence -, especially in the face of women’s increased demands for freedom against oppression and control.

Thus, violence is directed against women as a gender as a whole. The aim is to maintain an order based on gender inequality. 

As the Kurdish Women’s Movement, we believe that feminicide, that is, the systematic murder of women, is not an accumulation singular events; instead, their source derives from from societal sexism and misogyny, and therefore an effective struggle against the masculinist mentality is an essential condition to prevent more feminicide.

As women, we know that the pressures and attacks on our gender, body, emotions and thoughts are systematized by murder, harassment, renewed and recurring forms of violence, prohibitions and manipulations.

In this sense, systematized sexism means that the state and the dominant male make use of violence against women in various forms in every moment of daily life. Marriage at young age, polygamy, female genital mutilation, women’s unemployment, the lack of women’s education and health rights, the invisibilization of women’s labor, including maternity labor, the use of women’s labor as cheap labor force, the forcing of women into prostitution and drug use, interference with women’s clothes choices and ability to travel, abortion bans, forced childbirth, withdrawal of child custody, anti-women media policies, etc. All these are the misogynist policies of male-dominated fascist mentalities, and the states and systems in their power.

And these policies target society, life and humanity through feminicide.

Against all of these practices, struggles are being led all over the world. They already brought about significant results, contributing to the growth of women’s consciousness, giving morale to all of us, adding strength to our strength, and increasing the fear of the patriarchal system.

As women, our task is to render our struggle against feminicide more organized by revealing transformative power and continue the resistance.

The free future belongs to all the oppressed, who resist in an organized and determined way with the leadership role of women.