WOMEN ASK FOR COMPENSATION

The Conference of Durban against racism and intolerance have been a meeting place for victims of slavery, colonization, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, the caste system and all kind of religious and political violence. And what about women ? Sexism was only evoked in the context of the dual oppression it implies for them : a black woman, a muslim woman, a Dalit woman, a Rom woman…But women as victims of a specific kind of oppression, the Patriarchy, out of the question !

We, the Women of the World

denounce the violence and the various forms of exploitation
that men have inflicted and continue to inflict on us for millennia :

for our bound feet

our necks imprisoned in rings

our sex cut or sewn up

our plate-lips or our pierced ears

our chastity belts or virginity controls

our corsets that suffocate us

for our bodies anorexically starved or fattened according to their rules

for the women they deprive of education, liberty, autonomy

for the women shut into harems or in the home

behind the veil, the tchador, the tchadri or the burqa

for the precocious  weddings, the imposed sexual intercourse

the unwanted pregnancies, the forced sterilizations

the abortion of female fetuses

for polygyny, repudiation, the dowry system

the discrimination in inheritance

for economic exploitation, domestic slavery, the double work day

for the blows, the insults, the moral and sexual harassment

for the private or collective rapes

for pornography, prostitution

women sold in “ temporary marriages ” or by Organized crime

for the acid throwing, the stoning and the rite of Sati

for the “ witches ” burned alive

for the honor killings, the murders of women

for religious or political slaughters

for the little girls they kill or prevent from being born : 100.000.000  women missing in the world …

for the control they have exercised and continue to exercise on our lives

for our lives that they have stolen

for our intelligence that they have smothered

for the divisions they have created among us to keep us enslaved,

for all the appalling crimes men have committed against women since time immemorial,

for having made us the symbol of EVIL in the misogynous religions they have created in their own image, a characteristic tenet of any racist ideology,

for our Human Rights that have been scorned, We, the Women of the World, ask the Governments of the various countries for apologize and to place a true value on the financial, legal, professional and political compensations that women have the right to receive.

SOS SEXISME sexisme@sos-sexisme.org

http://www.sos-sexisme.org     fax : 33 –  (0)1 - 46261482

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Petition to be signed