2015 marked a milestone for everyone, everyone and everyone because we collectively said “enough” to gender violence. With the Ni Una Menos movement, the streets were flooded with the demands and demands of the women’s and diversity movements that raised their voices to ask the State to fulfill its role. That moment positioned us as relevant political actors in a scenario where our basic rights were violated.
We entered the scene with force, at a key moment to fight the neoliberalism that ruled between 2016 and 2019. The First National Strike of Women in Argentina made this clear. He realized that women and LGBTI + are among the most vulnerable groups and most at risk of experiencing situations of violence. We make visible that poverty has the face of a woman, because it is more difficult for us to access work, education, because we are paid less for the same task and because, in addition, we mostly take care of care work, holding a double working day or triple.
We understand very clearly that there is no way to begin to reverse this structural base of inequalities if it is not done with a strong political decision. Making visible, naming, registering inequalities and violence is an act of justice. Working from the State to address them and protect the rights that are violated is a responsibility.
The decision of President Alberto Fernández and Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner to create the Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity of the Nation, taking the gender and diversity agenda to the highest institutional hierarchy, advances in this regard. Creating structures to develop public policies aimed at reducing gender inequalities and addressing gender violence implies, in addition to focusing on these issues, allocating a budget, strengthening regulations and promoting initiatives that aim to transform the reality of women and LGBTI + from our country.
We propose a challenging task: to modify the structural basis of gender inequalities and for that it is essential to mainstream the gender and diversity approach in all areas. What does this mean? that when we design public policies we have to broaden our gaze and consider the perspectives of those who are impacted by inequalities. When housing policies are made, we have to think about them from the perspective of gender and diversity, promoting initiatives that have an impact on access to those homes for those who need it most. In the same way, when we think about health, education, production, and work policies, among many areas and topics that the State addresses with actions of different types, it is necessary to consider the structural inequalities that we must correct with each action of the State. The gender and diversity perspective is an invitation to think about policies without ignoring the differential impacts for women and LGBTI + that public decisions have in a society with deep gender inequalities.
We propose a challenge of great dimensions: to transform the State. And this requires our active and committed participation to be in the place where decisions are made, prioritize and enhance our agenda. Achieving this implies growing the gender institutional framework so that in each of the 2300 municipalities of the country there is a gender and diversity area with multidisciplinary teams that work and address these issues. And ministries in each province, to enhance the mainstreaming of the gender and diversity perspective and promote multi-agency.
Our responsibility in this historical moment that combines political decision and the strength of the movement is to give more and better answers. It is working to complement our policies in the different powers and levels of the State, it is managing the information so that when a person requires assistance we have a common tool, a joint strategy, a comprehensive approach that prevents revictimization and increased risk in situations of violence.
We are strengthening the work of community, social and rural organizations throughout the territory, which now have new tools that are public policies on gender and diversity promoted by the ministry that I have to lead. We assist in the emergency in the face of gender-based violence but we do not lose sight of the fact that the necessary transformations are based on medium and long-term actions so that women and LGBTI + can develop independent lives free of violence.
We are promoting a comprehensive reform project of Law No. 26,485. We want it to be a regulation that is sensitive to the changes that are taking place in society, that contemplates the transformations that have taken place since its enactment and that incorporates the way in which we address gender-based violence today. This is a conquest, it is a tool that we appropriate, an innovative standard that speaks of this moment that we are living. It is necessary to extend its scope so that it represents and reflects the agreements we reached, the rights of women and LGBTI + that it seeks to protect and guarantee.
Modifying a law as innovative as 26,485, shows that we are making progress, that there is a higher level of awareness of the problems that we as a society are facing and that we have the power to take charge of transforming the reality in which we live.
We have a historical obligation to defend what we have achieved, to honor the struggle that women and LGBTI + have carried out for our dignity and our rights. We are moved by the conviction to keep moving forward because of what we lack, because we are not going to stop until we have transformed everything that needs to be transformed.
* Minister of Women, Gender and Diversity of the Nation
Source From: Ambito
