25 November, 2011
The ICEM opened day two of its 5th Statutory Congress in Buenos Aires with moving observance today, 25 November, of International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. ICEM Executive Committee Member Tony Maher, the General President of the Mining & Energy Division of the Construction, Forestry, Mining & Energy Union (CFMEU) of Australia, opened the session by proclaiming ICEM awareness to the issue.
“Until men stop perpetrating violence against women, it will continue. It won’t stop until men stand up and put a stop to it,” said Maher, who explained Australia’s White Ribbon anti-violence campaign to the 800 ICEM delegates.
Tony Maher
Maher added: “Unions in male dominated industries have a special obligation to take up the campaign. We are in a unique position to make a significant difference in the workplace.”
Delegates to the Congress also turned their attention to a joint study released today by the ICEM and the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) entitled “Violence Against Women in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo: Whose Responsibility? Whose Complicity?”
The study inspects violence against women in the DRC, whether domestic, violence on the job, or violence from conflict, where rape is a weapon in war. The ICEM/ITUC study, in part, depicts rape in the context of war as the most striking form of inequality between men and women.
In the DRC, men seek to conquer other men by attacking and raping women, and women are raped for punishment and for revenge.
Today marks the 12th year that world civil society has marked the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, with the UN General Assembly designating the day at its 54th session. The date 25 November was designated because it was that day in 1960 that three political activists in the Dominican Republican – the Mirabal sisters – were brutally assassinated by the regime of dictator Rafael Trujillo.
Today also marks day one of 16 Days Against Gender Violence, as designated by the Global Campaign for Women’s Human Rights. From 25 November to 10 December, the campaign links the connection between women, violence and human rights, and encompasses 25 November, the 1 December World Aids Day, the Montreal Massacre of 6 December 1989, when 14 female engineering students were gunned down in Canada for being feminists, and 10 December, Human Rights Day.