This violent world
Violence against women assumes new dimensions when placed in the context of the current economic and social crisis. The crisis of unemployment and poverty besieges all Latin American countries where the governments brutally apply programmes of "structural adjustment" imposed by international financial organisations In this context, women's organisations have seen an increased need to defend women's political, social, economic, and gender rights while at the same time denouncing violence, both domestic and institutional. Estela Retamoso* "Luna Nueva" (New Moon) was formally constituted in the beginning of 1990. It is an organised expression of the women's movement with the goal of launching initiatives against abuse and violence against women. We work out of the Development Commission in Brandi, a lower-income residential district of Montevideo, and we offer counselling and services in another office located downtown.
We have developed individual and group counselling as well as counselling and educational services for institutions and companies that request them (elementary schools, high schools, shelters, public and private corporations, unions, and neighbourhood organisations).
Women and professionals who work in health services and education, who are particularly sensitive and experienced in the issues, participate in the workshops and courses we offer. Also participating are women who have been victimised and want to affect change as community activists.
On a theoretical level, we look at violence from different analytical positions, the study of specific situations and possible solutions to characteristic cases, legal aspects, syndromes, and profiles of victims and abusers. On a practical level we use the Rolando Toro System "Biodance" approach to connect with our feelings, self-esteem and self-image, seltdefence techniques, desires, dreams, our endogenous humour, and our immunity.
These aspects of our work strengthen the women who seek our services, because they speak to the most intimate of the intimate, to those aspects of their identity that make them vulnerable and possible victims, their capacity to respond, resi28 International Viewpoint #298 lience (the ability to survive a crisis situation), the creativity often needed to find a solution, which often depends on attending to these specific questions. We integrate reason into human emotion.
Our goal is to strengthen the place of women by tackling those concerns that are particular to women, like chaos and uncertainty, the search for solutions to complex situations, and continually weaving the fabric of solidarity, of assistance, of "invisible" services between women. These are all old struggles that we as women should confront with new elements. • Women who obtain food for themselves and families of men who have been arrested for robbery, and illegal activities aimed at survival, since they feel insecure when their men are • Women who take turns taking care of each others' children, since as women heads-of-household (of which the number is constantly increasing in all social strata) they go to work in turns.
• Women who get together to "con-
, to figure out how to help their neighbour who was beaten by her husband (51.6% of the cases of violence in our country.
• Women who are victims of sexual abuse in the workplace. • Women who are charged with responding violently and in some cases killing their husbands, tired after years
• Adolescents who have been abused by their boyfriends, or the steadily increasing percentage of pregnancies among girls 14 years and younger. • Drug addicts
This reality, plus the increase in female-headed households, discrimination, and unemployment guarantees the feminisation of poverty. A whole chapter could be devoted to the sexual abuse and mistreatment of children. Self-help and self-organisation.
From the beginning, one of the principle tasks was and continues to be promoting self-help and forming groups of women to address local and social initiatives against this unjust reality. By this we mean personal self-help in terms of the search for concrete and practical solutions to domestic situations and also the possibility of assisting organisationally. Also the elaboration of physical, verbal, and group responses and self-defence techniques used when faced with violence.
This is the reason we participate in the neighbourhood and social movements rather than only in groups specifically for abused women. It is in these movements that women from different social and even global situations meet. By doing this, we reflect on our social experience of gender and organise around it, acting on a more general level, as a way to extend the effects of our work and generate other levels of consciousness. Women, primary targets of violence.
We understand that violence has taken on different guises that adjust to the historic and political situation. Even today, the institutional responses are merely words, not backed up by effective and concrete measures, not even the application of existing legislation.
Violence in relationships, the impact of violence on women's health, sexual abuse against children, domestic violence, violence in the street and in our neighbourhoods, violent rapes, sexual harassment in the workplace... these are all part of a monster so well known to women everywhere.
The massive violence in Latin American countries is used as a form of education, to prepare us for the future. Again, women are an easy target. Paradoxically, these forms of daily violence are what facilitate the future use of violence against women during war. This is what is now occurring in Chiapas, where paramilitary and army massacres mainly target women, most of them pregnant. Prioritising the collective without disregarding the personal
Our organisation offers collective assistance, and does not attempt to offer personal proposals. We feel assistance should be based on the self-organisation of women, for their domestic and social demands.
Precisely at a time when the women's movement has been weakened, the participation of women in general as well as neighbourhood struggles has been constant, although dispersed. Many movements aimed at survival and self-organisation, as well as neighbourhood struggles and land occupations are co-ordinated by women.
It is also important to note that there has been important progress in the union movement, with new women's caucuses with policies specifically geared to women workers.
The establishment of a tripartite commission in the Labour Ministry (with the aim of bringing labour legislation in line with international agreements, especially those established by the ILO), takes into account the demands formulated by the Women's Commission of the PIT-CNT labour confederation with respect to equal opportunity and against discrimination in the areas of retirement and salaries.
THAT'S WHY GREEDY COMPANIES Disney Haiti Justice Campaign
LIKE DISNEY CALL HAITI THE Pocahantas pyjamas cost $12 in New York. The Haitian women who make them get 5-7 cents. No wonder workers at Disney subcontractors are trying to organize. We want Disney to stop doing business with subcontractors who refuse their workers' demands for • A wage of at least
$5 per day (double current rates) • genuine collective bargaining.
Improved working conditions, such as clean drinking water. • An end to indiscriminate layoffs, and firings for union organizing.
We have postcards, fact sheets and other materials which you can adapt for local organizing efforts.
* Disney/Haiti Justice Campaign, PO. Box 755, Fort Washington Station
New York, NY 10001; (212) 592-3612. E-mail <bloom@soholios.coms.
Gender and general struggles.
We are convinced that the headway women have made has been related to and has functioned in conjunction with popular struggles as a whole and that it is necessary to continue to articulate our specific demands within this social activism, without losing our own roles and spaces we have fought to win. Particularly since when an anti-popular social or economic policy is imposed, it is we, as women, who are always in the eye of the storm. Violence then invariably becomes a very effective method of the accompanying repression - because each act of violence sets an example.
The state has played a key role in dismantling the women's movement: assimilating (and distorting) proposals, using economic support measures to its advantage, playing pork-barrel favouritism and co opting feminist activists who wound up capitulating when faced with the economic crisis and the lack of credibility of alternatives to neoliberal solutions.
The feminist agenda has been reduced to only a few official "acts" , with hardly any autonomous proposals. In some neighbourhoods, some isolated activities of organisations like Luna Nueva remain. The co-ordination and organisation that characterised past periods has been lost and weakened. Academic scholarship, theoretical discussions, and participation in international conferences has weakened the combative nature of feminist activism engaged with and a part of the popular sectors. Globalising our demands
In the face of capitalist globalisation and regional integration, it is necessary to integrate the social movements too. To create a common analysis of our demands, of our struggles and resistance, and to share the multicoloured nature of our social, political, and gender experiences. Bringing these experience to bear upon our social activism is essential. It depends on the elaboration of alternative proposals
THESE EXPLOITED WORKERS
MAKE ONLY 284 TO 35¢ AN HOUR,
OR ABOUT 5E FOR EVERY DISNEY
GARMENT THEY MAKE!
that have a common effect on society, and thus avoid the narrow road of the day-to-day routine work that prevents us from seeing the bigger picture.
Now more than ever, we need to consolidate the social networks that will allow us to emerge from our isolation, combine our specific demands with those basic demands that have long been unsatisfied MAGIC KINGDOM!!
- new questions in feminism
THATS A REAL TURN OFF!
I SURE WOULDN'T WANT TO
GO OUT WITH SOMEONE
WHO COULD BEAT ME UP!
NEITHER
WOULD
GOLDAIN and that directly affect the popular sectors.
To combine the personal growth of all women individually with the growth and strengthening of the collective whole. *
*Estela Retamoso is an organiser, sexologist & educator, specialising in domestic and sexual violence. She is the
General Co-ordinator of Luna Nueva and a member of the Women's Commission of the Socialist Worker's Party
(Uruguayan section of the 4" International)
29
----- photo credits and running heads -----
I!
RIDE
Harsh realities
Careful language and good intentions combine, in a text that almost anyone could sign. But the diagnosis is too lukewarm. Almost 200 million Latin Americans (46% of the population) live in economic misery; 80 million people "live" with less than two dollars daily; up to 20% of the economically active population unemployed, and 50% is under-employed.
Expenditures in housing, health, and education have been reduced in all the countries by the efforts and grace of the international financial organisations which the document does not even mention. Infant mortality, the marinalisation of millions of youth, the exploitation of child labour, prostitution as a strategy of survival, the diseases of poverty (such as cholera) reproduce, without a solution in sight, in the framework of a savagely deregulated capitalism.
The scenario is much more frightening than is portrayed by those left parties with pretensions and possibilities of governing.
Look at Brazil, the largest country in Latin America. There are 15.8 million adolescents (15 to 19 years) of whom one million are illiterate (Diario Folha de Sao Paulo, 6/10/97). An estimated 0.83% of