Not a step back

By María Dolores Corujo If the crisis has shown us anything, it is that nothing is conquered. If an ideological management of the right is added to the crisis, the dream that we once cherished is brutally broken, the illusion that the conquests ...

March 6 2013 (01:31 WET)
By María Dolores Corujo
If the crisis has shown us anything, it is that nothing is conquered. If an ideological management of the right is added to the crisis, the dream that we once cherished is brutally broken, the illusion that the conquests ...

If the crisis has shown us anything, it is that nothing is conquered. If an ideological management of the right is added to the crisis, the dream that we once cherished is brutally broken, the illusion that social conquests were ours and had come to stay. For us, for our daughters and our granddaughters.

The dismantling of the public sector hits the weakest groups and people, who are increasingly, we are, more. No one is safe, we all have friends and family who have seen their life project broken to become part of that painful statistic of more than six million unemployed.

This scenario of extreme harshness implies an extra suffering for women. In addition to wage and professional discrimination, workplace harassment, and the double shift at home, today there is the abandonment of equality and dependency policies.

We have learned, painfully, that equality does not materialize through its recognition in the Constitution, that the consecration of a right must have the support of active policies that translate desire into reality. We know that to stop criminal machismo, concrete measures of protection, awareness, and normalization of the victim's life are necessary.

However, the General State Budgets for 2013 have decreased the item destined for comprehensive prevention against gender violence by 27 percent, while the active insertion income, which guarantees support for the victim, has seen its amount decrease by 70 percent.

For this reason, in the face of the abandonment of equality policies, this March 8th takes on even greater importance. Austerity is being used by the government of the Popular Party as an alibi for the dismantling of everything it does not believe in, especially in what refers to equality between men and women.

The statements about the "false accusations" of the UpyD deputy, the white label of the Spanish right, and the PP's refusal to censure him, are not a simple anecdote. On the contrary, they demonstrate that it is not just a matter of budget restrictions: it is a decision of an ideological nature.

As a woman and as a socialist, I have received with enormous satisfaction each step taken towards achieving equality between genders, fundamentally thanks to socialist governments. But I do not hide that these advances have not prevented me in any case from feeling that we still needed to do more.

Now, subjected to this social counter-reform of the Popular Party, it is more necessary than ever that progressive men and women commit our effort to the defense of social conquests, of those rights that day by day, decree by decree, they intend to snatch from us.

Therefore, this March 8th, socialist women and men are going to take to the streets with a very clear message: In equality, not a step back.

*María Dolores Corujo, general secretary of the Socialists of Lanzarote.

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