The Long Climb Up: Women Fighting for Survival and Full Enjoyment of Human Rights
Poverty, economic marginalization and exploitation render women more vulnerable to gender-based violence and pull women down in their uphill climb to fully enjoy their rights. Access to and control over land and resources remain a significant barrier for many women in Asia.
As women fight for survival and gender justice in the face of multiple crises of health, economic recession and climate emergency, we call attention to the policies, structures, and systemic issues that deny their access to economic resources, opportunities, and public services that are vital to their survival, safety and security, and to the fulfillment of their full human potential.
Poverty, economic marginalization and exploitation render women more vulnerable to gender-based violence and pull women down in their uphill climb to fully enjoy their rights. Access to and control over land and resources remain a significant barrier for many women in Asia.
Long-standing cultural norms and practices and neo-liberal macro-economic policies make for a ‘deadly’ combination of factors that have kept women in marginalized or exploited positions.
Existing tax and fiscal systems contribute to the prevalence of all forms of GBV and constrain capacities of states to scale up and expand comprehensive measures to prevent and end GBV and fulfill their human rights obligations. Decades of loss of public revenues due to unsustainable and illegitimate debt burdens, corporate tax abuses and illicit financial flows (IFFs) massively to the decline of health and education systems and public services in general. This has provided a questionable excuse for privatization and, combined with austerity measures imposed by international financial institutions such as the IMF and WB, rendered public services even less accessible and affordable to women and marginalized communities. Import liberalization, unfair trade and investment agreements, and unabated profit driven extraction of natural resources have eroded food sovereignty and hindered peoples’ access to and control over food, land, water, knowledge systems, and other resources.
Governments in Asia continue to peddle generous tax incentives to multinational corporations while resorting to regressive tax policies like VAT and other consumption taxes to fund public coffers. While corporations enjoy tax privileges and get away with abusive practices, there is no escape for the ordinary consumer from consumption taxes like Value Added Tax (VAT) which hit women and the poor especially hardest.
All these have exacerbated the social and economic marginalisation of women and increased their vulnerability and exposure to all forms of violence and exploitation. With economic recession just setting in, the economic hardships of women, and all the attendant risks and insecurities, are far from over.
Threats to food security caused by erratic weather patterns also serve as drivers for gender-based violence. Whenever and wherever disaster strikes, women’s multiple burden increases and so does their exposure to gender-based violence. The failure to stem the climate crisis thus adds to the multi-layered context and environment that make the road to women’s full enjoyment of human rights a long and uphill climb.
The struggle to end all forms of gender-based violence and discrimination against women is an integral part of women’s fights for survival, safety, security, justice and system change. The Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development (APMDD) is committed to advancing and intensifying our campaigns for economic justice, climate justice and energy transformation as part of our contribution to these struggles. APMDD, in solidarity with women in the fight against multiple barriers to the full enjoyment of their rights, advance the following calls and demands:
- End all forms of Gender-based Violence! Ensure public funding for women-led comprehensive measures for prevention and response! Ensure adequate and sustained support for GBV victim-survivors and their families!
- Make quality gender-responsive public services and publicly-funded infrastructures available and accessible to women!
- Unconditional debt cancellation now! Cancel all illegitimate debts! Free up debt service payments to realize women’s human rights and gender justice.
- End unjust tax burdens on women! Make taxes work for women! Increase allocation of tax revenues for gender-responsive services!
- Stop illicit financial flows! Stop tax abuses of corporations and elites!
- Climate justice now! Make climate policies and financing projects, disaster risk reduction measures, and humanitarian actions responsive to the needs and justice demands of women and girls! Respect and uphold women’s human rights at all times and all places!
- Women, fight for system change!
Fight for Women’s Survival, Safety, and Security in the Face of Multiple Crises!
Fight for Economic and Gender Justice!
Fight for System Change!
