Fundación Secretariado Gitano

25N. International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women [editar]

• Gender Equality and Romani Women
• National level

We want to join in the painful memory of the 37 women murdered in Spain to date in 2024; of the 58 murdered in 2023; of the 1 281 women murdered in our country due to gender violence since 2003, when official statistics began to be collected.

From these data we can conclude that violence against women is neither fortuitous nor casual, this violence is the expression and the most radical consequence of the historically established inequalities between women and men, which the patriarchal, sexist and racist society is responsible for imposing. Violence is structural and does not respond to ethnic or racial characteristics, nor are they isolated cases, but is the result of socio-cultural and personal mechanisms that cause violence to be produced and maintained in a toxic and recurrent form in society.

Poverty is a manifestation of the violence that permeates us as women and girls. And despite economic growth and increased employment in Spain, many families, including many Roma families, even with a job, continue to live in poverty, unable to cover basic needs or make ends meet.

And focusing on the Roma people, Roma women and girls face a serious situation of socio-economic vulnerability: the rate of poverty and exclusion is very high.

It is necessary to show the contexts and situations in which women continue to be subordinated and mistreated because they are women and not men. At the same time, it is necessary to make visible the trajectory of the struggle for equality that women and girls have fought for throughout history and to expose the need to advance in rights so that there is justice and not to take a single step backwards in what has already been achieved.

When a woman suffers gender violence, it is not her problem, it is everyone's problem, that is why we cannot leave them alone, we cannot look the other way, we cannot identify situations of male violence as something that is private to the couple.

Because if we do nothing, if we do not raise our voices, if we do not support them, accompany them, listen to them, or give them resources to get out of the violence, they will continue to suffer, they will continue to cry, they will continue to endure and some will end up being murdered by their partners or ex-partners, as we see happening on many occasions.

We Roma women are at a greater disadvantage when we are victims of gender violence, as we have seen this year with some court rulings in Spain. We have witnessed judgments on sexual assaults on Roma girls in which these sexual assaults are associated with cultural issues, attenuating the criminal responsibility of the aggressors and leaving the victims physically and legally unprotected and re-victimised.

That is why, from the GMG and as Roma women, we shout loudly that violence has no culture, violence is structural and patriarchal and is always in the hands of those who exercise power over others. Roma women need protection from violence and we do not want people to look the other way. We demand justice for our pain.

Today, we demand a privileged position in the fight for the elimination of violence against women and girls in the political, economic and social agendas, and at the same time we demand a social mobilisation and a real involvement of those sectors of global society that until now have benefited from the detriment of women and especially of the most vulnerable women, such as Roma women. Equality must not stop receiving attention and efforts as it is a matter of full democracy, justice, development and peace.

There is no excuse for not doing so, with the work of all of us, WE WILL GET IT.

#25N2024FSG #25N2024GMG

#NOEXCUSES 

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