TODAY is the 30th anniversary of the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women and Girls issued by the UN General Assembly in 1993.

To commemorate this day, the Communist Party and its Women’s Commission had planned to host a webinar on The Violence of Misogyny, a global apparatus of women’s oppression with a panel of international speakers.

Then, on October 7, Hamas launched a brutal attack on Israel that has resulted in Israel’s ongoing retaliatory war on Gaza.  

This has caught up the whole of the civilian Palestinian population living there. Settler and IDF violence in the West Bank followed causing destruction and death on a terrible scale — women and children accounting for 70 per cent of all Palestinians killed.

The massive and continuing demonstrations in Britain and elsewhere, the pressure being put on our elected representatives to call for a ceasefire and the demand for justice for Palestinians in their struggle against occupation have been promoted and supported by our party.  

This affected the amount of planning, publicity and exposure that our webinar should have received to make it successful and so, very reluctantly, we have decided to postpone the event for a short time.

The UN Declaration defines violence against women as “any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life.”

The present situation in Gaza has set out the stark and cruel realities of the consequences of war for women.

Vulnerable to the massive disruption of vital health and maternity care, the estimated 50,000 pregnant women in Gaza cannot get the medicines and obstetric services they need for safe delivery.

Women are giving birth among the rubble of destroyed homes and hospitals or are sheltering in facilities provided by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) where water and food supplies are rapidly running out.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO) “maternal deaths are expected to increase given the lack of access to adequate care. The psychological toll of the hostilities also has direct – and sometimes deadly – consequences on reproductive health, including a rise in stress-induced miscarriages, stillbirths and premature births.”

As hospitals and health facilities providing maternity services are lost to bombardment, women die giving birth — deaths that are preventable. And we have all seen the pictures of premature babies dying for lack of functioning incubators.

In war conditions throughout the world, women and girls face the most extreme risks. They are exposed to torture, sexual, physical, verbal violence and displacement — forming the largest group in refugee camps with their children. 

As Marxist women, we understand that in wars carried out by imperialist powers for domination and to entrench their colonialist aims, sex-based violence in the form of rape, psychological and physical abuse is used as form of control and terror. It disrupts communities, discourages and weakens resistance.

Yet, women’s historical struggle for emancipation from the patriarchal system which perpetuates their oppression under capitalism, has strengthened the global women’s movement and the fight for a better world.

In countries like Cuba, taking a different political path, women’s rights are enshrined within the constitution and women are decision-makers in their own right. Although there is still a job to do in educating their menfolk, social support and protection for women is guaranteed by their own organisations within their communities.      

Communist women say: there is no liberation without socialism and no socialism without women’s liberation.

Carol Stavris is an executive committee member of the Communist Party of Britain.