What is the campaign?

The neoliberal model of agricultural production based on monoculture, export-oriented agriculture and high use of chemical inputs has destroyed rural livelihoods and pushed millions of farmers to the big cities, while destroying nature. It has created hunger, misery and exclusion for the benefit of large transnational companies. This system has particularly affected women: the inequality of the sexes, in the sexual division of work that keeps women as responsible for domestic work and the care of children, the sick and the aged in families. In salaried jobs, women who have the same or greater qualifications get paid less than men for doing the same work.

Moreover, women are also victimed by domestic violence where power relations are hidden, submission and violence are naturalized, where society "washes its hands" and applies the slogan "in a fight between a husband and wife, don’t get involved". These values are handed down from generation to generation, perpetuated and reinforced by religions that use their tools, rites, and rules to justify and maintain patriarchy and with this, affirm that a woman should be submissive to a man.

The patriarchal capitalist culture is held up by four pillars of violence:

1. Violence based on the economic dependency of women, unemployment, and underemployment in the cities. In the countryside, the work of women is not recognized as something that creates income and wealth; it is seen as a help to the husband/partner. Women have limited access to production resources, health, education, leisure, social protection and welfare, and security, among other things.
2. Violence because women have no control over the decisions about her own body. Men, the state, religion, family, and many social movements impose a pattern of obedience and behavior on women, preventing them from making their own decisions. For example, abortion rights are not garanteed in many parts of the world and trafficking of women occurs on a global scale.
3. Violence based of the exclusion of women from political participation - Women have little participation in the spaces of power and decision-making, from domestic spaces to leadership roles, these remain primarily with men (property, religious communities, political parties, the decision-making places of the state apparatus, social movements)
4. Physical and psychological violence is used against women when men do not manage to dominate by other means (men’s honor, machismo, control, power). Some rites and customs also marginalise women such as initiation rites, marriages at a young age, mutilations, forbiden food items, and other practices humiliating and hurting women. Those parctices are culturally reproduced, by men and women alike. More over, the state reppresion of women in protests and demonstraton show an institutionalized form of violence.

• Call to join the Campaign
• What is the campaign?
• The patriarchal capitalist culture is held up by four pillars of violence
• Objectives of the campaign