Violence, rape and feminicide: our answer is organized self-defense!
First of all we, the Internationalist Young Women Commune of Rojava, send greetings to all the young women in the world. In a sexist system that aims the domination of the whole world through the oppression and exploitation of the women’s bodies, cultures and values, the life of any young women is a resistance by itself.
We are writing these perspectives while entering now in a new political historical phase. In the recently published calls of Rêber Apo he made clear that the women and especially the young women have to play a central role in the democratic transformation of the society, leading the people out of this situation of chaos and violence. In the calls, especially the ones that he addressed to the women for the 8th of March and later on to the youth, Rêber Apo affirms again that the young women have the knowledge, the emotions and the strength to play this important role.
Now our question is: we, as young internationalist women, how much do we really believe to have the capacity to play this role? How much do we see ourselves as a leading force of change and creation? How much we recognize the perspectives of Rêber Apo inside of our lives and realities?
In a time where the violence waged against humanity by the unmoral capitalist and imperialist forces is reaching its highest level without any limit, the democratic forces must take a strong stance in the defense of freedom and democratic values. In doing so, we must deepen and strengthen our understanding of the roots of the social and political problems that we are facing.
The historical war against the young woman
In order to be able to correctly understand the present we have to look at the history of the women. In the Neolithic time, before the system of central civilization, the important role of the women in the society reached its peak. Since the beginning of central civilization, we see how the system of hierarchy and class domination started with a violent oppression of the woman in order to become effective and spread around the world. Instead of playing her central and natural role in the organization of the society, managing the economy and building the life, the woman became the property of the man.
We can find evidence of this process in the mythology of that time, in which the mother goddesses that before were represented as holy figures of free and natural life, began to be deprived of their role. The myth of Tiamat and Marduk symbolizes the violence of this process. Tiamat was one of the most important mother goddesses of the Neolithic time. Marduk, her son, killed her with three arrows. One inside her head, to kill her thoughts and values, one inside her heart, to kill her love and life, and one inside her uterus, to kill her ability to create life. After this episode, known as the first feminicide in the history of humanity, Marduk used her death body to create the earth and the sky. From this moment on a new culture was slowly built up – a culture of rape, killing and enslavement. Throughout the history, the dominant male mentality continued and developed itself, killing the ability of the woman to think, to love and to create life and using the women’s bodies, intelligence and emotions for its own interests.
During the 16th and 17th centuries, in the building and the spreading from England and Netherlands of capitalism, this mentality reached a new level with one of the most violent attacks against women that ever happened in the whole history of humanity, the witch hunting. The witch hunting destroyed a universe of believes and practices that, embodyng the values of the democratic, healthy and free society, represented an obstacle for the developing capitalist system. Within this process it becomes clear that capitalism built itself up on sexism. As a consequence of this massive violence also the other women learned to be obedient and silent and to submit to the hard work and abuse of men in order to survive and to be socially accepted. This dynamic continued until today and expressed itself in many different ways. As some examples, as women we learn to not trust in ourselves, to not believe in our thoughts and emotions, to not follow our instinct and to not speak without permission. We learn that if we want to live a life that is accepted in the system we have to shape our mentalities and our way of seeing and understanding the world like the man do. Or we have to become like the man wants us to be, accepting his violence and his oppression and normalizing it. At this point we should ask ourselves: When we talk, when we act, when we laugh, how much are we doing it according to the spirit of the free woman? Or how much our thoughts, emotions and actions are still under the influence of the man?
The sexist system’s oppression is organized worldwide
It is especially our responsibility, as young women, to be aware of the whole structure of violence and rape culture that the system has enforced on the societies all over the world in order to make the woman weaker and unable to play her vanguard role in the liberation of the peoples. As Reber Apo said “until the rape culture will not be overcomed, the truth of society cannot be revealed in the fields of philosophy, science, aesthetic, ethic and religion”. The construction and dissemination in the media of hypersexualized models of femininity has intensified the problem, openly inviting sexual aggression and contributing to this misogynistic and rape culture in which women’s aspirations for autonomy are degraded and reduced to the status of mere sexual provocation. Also in the fields of music, art, cinema the woman is represented as the object to sell, to conquer, to utilize. The sex industry, which is run predominantly by male criminal organizations capable of enforcing slavery in its cruelest form, its one of the highest example of this.
The brutality of the attacks on women is often so extreme that it seems devoid of any utilitarian purpose. The goal is again to terror and to make the woman feel powerless. Such violence cannot emerge from the daily life of any community, it is systemic violence. It is planned, calculated and executed with the greatest guarantee of not being punished from the nation- state.
We’re witnessing an escalation of violence against women, especially in those parts of the world – sub-Saharan Africa, Abya Yala, Southeast Asia – that are richest in natural resources and are now targeted by commercial enterprises, and where the anti-colonial struggle is strongest. The capitalist powers, through the Third World War, are determined to turn the world upside down in order to consolidate its power, which was weakened in the 1960s and 1970s by the anti-colonial, feminist and anti-apartheid struggles, and that is again under a great threath nowdays thanks to the uprisings of the youth all around the world and to the Jin Jiyan Azadi Revolution. Once again, their goal cannot be achieved without attacking the women, who are directly responsible for the reproduction and the defense of their communities.
The increasing militarization of the countries through the propaganda of war and national security, the building of new military bases and infrastructures, the strict connection between universities and war industries, the number of armed men legitimated by the state such as private domestic guards, commercial security guards, prison guards, gang and mafia members, and soldiers in regular or private armies, plays a central role in forging increasingly dominant man mentalities in the society. In this way violence becomes indivisible in every aspect of the life, and also individual male violence becomes the response to women’s more assertive demands for autonomy and freedom. The expression of this mentality is the growing number of women killed in their houses by their partners, on their place of work, in school, in the streets. For how long can we, women from all the countries, accept this violence? For how long we will continue to stay silent when the sexist system enslaves us and destroys our lands and societies?
Enough! We organize our own self-defense
Against these organized attacks of the system, our first step to defeat this violence is to organize ourselves. In doing so, we have to come together and become ourselves as young women, we must develop our own will and ways to protect ourselves from the attacks of the system through self defense. We must never forget that we are in a time of war and as a consequence also the resistance must be organized on several fronts, in all the fields of the life. The decision of women to react, break our isolation and join with other women is crucial to the success of our goals. Such an objective, however, cannot be achieved if we as women do not acquire the resources we need to be independent from the system of men, not just in a physical and economical way, but also in our thoughts and mentalities. so that we will not be forced to accept degrading and dangerous working conditions and family relationships in order to ensure our survival. Starting from this point, we will together develop the capacity to find solution and strategies that can serve the building and the defense of a life in freedom and coexistence for all the people. When we as women are a united front, we become a force of creation for a new way of life, a new culture based on the principle of the Democratic Society. For every woman killed by this dominant male system, we must organize together our strength and our will, we must build structures where we can live in a communal and autonomous way, we must organize self-defense courses, a system of education to understand the reality of the system and its attacks against us, we must create a sociality that is based on love, respect and dignity. We must start a global offensive to liberate ourselves and bring the world out of the chaos created by the system.