Violence against Women and Girls

Saturday’s 10th Reclaim the Night Rally in Belfast calling for an end to gender-based violence is a timely reminder of the daily threat facing women.

Violence against women – including intimate partner violence and sexual violence – is a major issue and a violation of women’s human rights.

As highlighted by Danielle Roberts of Reclaim the Night: “The number of domestic abuse incidents reported in the past 10 years has increased by over 20 per cent, while the number of domestic abuse femicides has also increased, from five in 2013 to nine in 2022”.

The United Nations defines violence against women as “any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual, or mental harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life.” The World Health Organisation has described violence against women as a “devastatingly pervasive” global issue.

In Ireland, 244 women have been murdered since 1996. In resolved cases, 87% of women were killed by a man known to them, and 13% were killed by a stranger. Current or former male intimate partners were responsible for 57% of the resolved cases. During the pandemic the levels of violence against women intensified.  

A 2023 Study revealed that almost 98% of women surveyed for a report into violence against women in Northern Ireland experienced at least one form of violence or abuse in their lifetime. Half of those interviewed experienced at least one form of violence or abuse before they were 11 years old.

The health sector has an important role to play in providing comprehensive health care to women subjected to violence, and as an entry point for referring women to other support services they may need.

Education also has an important role to play.  Recentpositive developments, including the introduction of new offences such as coercive control, stalking and non-fatal strangulation are important but insufficient.

The causes of sexual violence are multiple and complex but can only be fully understood when rooted in the social and economic structures of capitalism.

The states which currently support the State of Israel’s war crimes against the Palestinian people reinforce the brutality of state violence against women and girls on a massive scale. 

Violence against women and girls has to be understood in the context of the current social order. It is not simply the random acts of a few bad men; it is societal and systemic. 

Violence against women and girls occurs against a backdrop of the notion of women as the exclusive property of men, by objectification and commodification of women’s bodies, by unequal pay, sex discrimination and sexual harassment, sex disparity in domestic labour, childcare etc, by cutbacks in public expenditure which impact disproportionately on women and deepen inequality, by pervasive pornography, sex trafficking and a cruel and contemptuous misogyny.

Women have a unique role in relation to the mode of production. Violence against women is the inevitable material by-product of the sexism inherent in the capitalist system.

Only the transformation of the current social order and the creation of a socialist society can ultimately address the problems of inequality, injustice, poverty, exploitation and oppression.