WHAT WE DO

Patriarchal culture perpetuates the unequal power between men and women. It violates women’s autonomy and dignity, and perpetuates gender-based violence. Gender-based violence can be physical, sexual, economic, and psychological. Women are prone to GBV within the family, in workplaces, public spaces, and even online. While VAW is globally recognized as a human rights issue, governments sideline and cut budgets for services that prevent and combat GBV. GBV is also institutionalized in the police who are supposed to be primary providers of essential services in response to GBV. Throughout history, sexual violence and rape against women have been institutionalized and legitimized by the state, especially in contexts of war and militarization. Women human rights defenders (WHRDs) and their organizations experience harassment, surveillance, arrests and detention on false charges, and gender-based violence.

As many women are currently employed in precarious work, earning less than their male counterparts, they tend to be more reliant on social protection programmes. Women workers who are overrepresented in public service sectors (e.g., healthcare) lose employment due to austerity. Budget cuts in social services make sexual and reproductive healthcare services inaccessible, increasing maternal mortality, child and adolescent pregnancy. It also impacts services that prevent and address gender-based violence. Women’s underpaid and unpaid care work, including in home-based healthcare and education, compensates for gaps in social services.

Women comprise 50-90% of the workers in the existing 5,383 SEZs operating globally, with high concentrations in garments, electronics and textiles. Special Economic Zones (SEZs) are able to subvert national labor laws, meaning they pay less than minimum wage and skirt around meeting labor standards. While SEZs claim to create employment and grow the economy through industrialization they have failed at their task. The over-representation of women in the SEZ takes advantage of women’s lesser role in society to drive down the cost of wages and benefits to increase profits.

Migration is often driven by multiple factors, including socio-cultural drivers such as family. Importantly, migration itself is mostly a family decision and even when the migration decision is taken unilaterally, most migrants have a sense of family obligation and contribute to their families left behind, mainly through remittances as noted above. Both internal (mostly rural to urban) and international migration impacts family life. Individual family members leave behind their families embedded in social networks and face challenges rebuilding or creating new social networks in host countries. Labour migration often puts strain on families and contributes to family breakdown. Intergenerational relations between parents, grandparents and children as well as spouses and siblings are often negatively impacted as well. For instance, a growing phenomenon of ‘left behind children’ when young adults migrate to urban areas and leave their children in care of grandparents is likely to lead to intergenerational disagreements over parenting styles and expectations. Among the estimated 169 million international migrant workers, 70 million are women. A total of 79.9 percent of women migrant workers are employed in the service sector, including care and domestic work.

The Prison Industrial Complex (including immigration-detention) is just one of many examples in the US that makes it abundantly clear that we live in a system that prioritizes profit at the expense of its people. Every day working class and marginalized families are neglected and mistreated. Meanwhile the government continues to increase funding for penal systems (immigration-detention, incarceration, weapons manufacturing, etc.) and persistently slash social services budgets. Today’s landscape of punishment also includes the extensive criminalization of social problems such as homelessness and mental illness, policies that encourage racial profiling, the imposition of fines and fees that exacerbate poverty, high recidivism, and increased use of surveillance tech. All of these policies serve to ensure a steady or increasing prison population to guarantee a stable, highly exploitable and virtually free labor force for the US and its top corporations to rake in profits. Labor tied specifically to goods and services produced through state prison industries brought in more than $2 billion in 2021 and benefited some of the US’s largest producers (e.g. Tyson Foods, Hickman’s Family Farms, Cargill, etc).

Indigenous Women (girls +) murdered 10x higher than all other ethnicities. Murder is the 3rd leading cause of death for Indigenous Women (Centers for Disease Control). More than 4 out of 5 Indigenous Women have experienced violence (84.3%) (National Institute of Justice Report). More than half Indigenous Women experience sexual violence (56.1%). More than half Indigenous Women have been physically abused by their intimate partners (55.5 percent). Less than half of Indigenous Women have been stalked in their lifetime (48.8 percent). Indigenous Women are 1.7 times more likely than Anglo-American women to experience violence. Indigenous Women are 2xs more likely to be raped than Anglo-American white women. Murder rate of Indigenous Women is 3xs higher than Anglo-American women.