Violence against women is a monstrous crime against humanity and the one that is kept in secret the most. This is what the Party of the European Left raises its voice against on this November 25. In the European Year of Violence against Women in 2006, the European Left will conduct a campaign against this most frequent violation of human rights.

Everywhere in the world, every third women is exposed to violence, precisely because she is a woman. In Germany, each fifth woman suffers from physical or sexual violence by her partner.

It is the men, who exercise the violence against women, try to make it appear harmless and hide it.

Violence against women and children bears witness to the state of culture in a society. The judgement on us is clear: the varnish of civilisation is not thick, it is crumbling.

-    By way of forced prostitution and trade in humans, trade in women and in children in particular, the international mafia in the meantime gains more money than with drugs.
-    Following the estimates of the UN, there live at this time 200 million women less on earth than one might expect. They have been killed: aborted in a targeted way or assassinated as small girls. The women die, because they have even worse access to medical treatment, to food and to water than the men. The women and the children are the particularly vulnerable victims of war.
-    Calculating cold-bloodedly, the masters of the allegedly modern wars include into their plans the most archaic means of conducting wars: rape and in particular ethnic rape; masculine sperm becomes the most profound weapon of humiliation.
-    In the ghettos around our metropolises, group rapes belong to the rite of initiation of young men long time before cars have been burnt.

Yet, it is not poverty that makes men violent. One can admire how many millions of poor people live in dignity and in justice.

No, it is domination and exploitation that are the principal reasons for repression against the feminine gender. At the same time, the patriarchal and capitalist interests are mutually reinforcing. The right of the strongest engenders violence against women. By turning war once more into a means of European politics, by transforming people into "human capital" ("useful" or "useless"), by destroying not only the welfare or social state, but by chasing the idea of the social from politics, relations of violence spread in our society - in work, in the media, in our relationship with nature, on the streets, in the apartments.

This is the source that feeds terrorism, racism, and violence against women.

The images of gender roles deform men and women. As long as men have the reputation of being the strong gender, they must or they want to satisfy to this designation, even if they are very weak at the moment, even at the price of their own brutalisation.

We demand better laws for the protection of victims and for the banishment of crimes and criminals. We demand social security, equal access to medical treatment for men and women, to education, to gainful employment, and a basic existential security for everybody.

The Left in Europe is a political movement, and it is a cultural movement. It does not only want to eliminate the economically based relationships of oppression, but all relationships of oppression, independently of their base in ethnicity, religion, or gender. The European Left wants to bring about a very profound change in societies in direction of a culture of humanity, human rights, and respect. We have departed in this direction. And we demand this not only of others, but first of all from ourselves.