Argentina: #MiráCómoNosPonemos, the answer is political

The brave denunciation against Juan Darthés Thelma Fardin, with Argentine actresses, had high social impact and opened dams. While we revictimizan institutions and many media confine us in that role and / or trivialize the issue, women are still debating how best to combat gender violence and its causes, how to change this patriarchal justice and the effectiveness or otherwise of policy punitivista. Some guidelines for reflection.

From the complaint of Thelma grew first-person accounts in networks, Calls to the line 144 and social and criminal complaints. The collective cry # MiráCómoNosPonemos affects all areas, including political. These days a radical senator was accused of sexual abuse, Buenos Aires is also a senator from La Campora and Quilmes councilor Renewal Front and unionist was arrested for pimping. And the list goes on.

Proliferation cases realizes a systemic problem. With different levels of individual responsibility, damage and gravity, all express the patriarchal order. Como says the anthropologist Rita Segato, Masculinity has a mandate of rape: in it there is no sexual motive, but a demonstration of power that seeks aleccionar (and the paradox is that the aggressor supposed moralizing). The sea, It is "a healthy child of patriarchy", whose mandate is built by this company.

Denaturation forces transform gender relations and to disarm the asymmetries of power between binarisms man / woman, heterosexual / homosexual and cis / transgender. This includes changing the historical role of men, today in deep crisis. At the same time, You should lead us to question this whole socioeconomic system and its state, that is patriarchal and capitalist time, for being the origin of machismo and other violence. The problem then is not moral, but political. And punitivity, which it is also moralizador, It reduces the issue of violence at individual level without attacking their root causes.

The anti-capitalist feminism is not punitivista

In cases of gender violence, immediate is to protect the complainant and separate the accused from the field to share, without waiting for the court ruling. But there is a feminist punitivista industry whose axis of action is escrache and evening denounces automatic sentence. Escrache can sometimes be helpful, but it depends if it strengthens the demand for justice, not when it replaced.

About, Rita Segato warns anthropologist: "Beware of lynchings, for we have long defended the right to fair trial, which it is nothing more than the right to contradictory, the contradiction, the counterargument in judgment "1. Thelma said something similar: "What I want is to build something new ... I do not believe in escrache by escrache, fall into that is very dangerous "2.

The mobilization includes escraches when there is no justice, as in the case of Lucía Pérez, whose court acquitted FEMICA. But the content should be different from lynching. Segato agrega: "When the state courts fails, other forms of justice appear, but they are not spontaneous, as there deliberation, query, listen out, and consideration by the group that may be making a mistake 'That is the contradictory, That is the space for the possibility of contradiction. Lynching is an embodiment without any such guarantees. "

Considering the complaint (so immediate protection for the victim), and knowing that sometimes it is delayed by the patriarchal environment itself, then must investigate and right to defense 3 Y, if appropriate sanction, the true reparation must be transcendent and systemic. Each time a man commits sexist violence must provide a specific sentence, but besides being according to the type of damage should aim for a social transformation. This does not mean that sometimes there are political use of complaints or false attacks and discrediting campaign.

Sexual assaults that got criminalize are just the tip of the iceberg of social behavior. Long they constituted "the world" and their ways of understanding, Women today are disarming. So you have to fight for justice, understanding that if someone incurs an abusive practice does not necessarily become a lifelong abuser if appropriate measures are taken. It is not the same a fact that repeated practice. Nor it is almost equally among peers, as occurs among adolescents in schools, often by absence and / or shift adults- when there is a large imbalance of power, as in the case of pedophile priests abusers. All violence is punishable, but they are not all alike. Must be challenged institutions, and if they fail, collectively draw up the complaint.

punitivity, instead, only it proposes neutralize people by way of their confinement, elimination or social expulsion. But these hardline policies were never guarantee that decrease violence. Not when there is an advanced official punitivista which aims to appropriate the capital conquered and use the figure of women as victims to resolve these issues. Such is the policy of the PRO and penal reform 2016, with indiscriminate increase of penalties and greater autonomy forces policiales4. At that time the collective, no less raised well: "on the streets, while feminism and women's groups, lesbians, transvestites and trans dolíamos us angrily by telling a femicide more, however none asked what this bill proposes. "

counterexample are many proposals have been making feminismos around ESI, the budget for the Law 26.485 anti-violence and other more substantive changes.
Changing the rules, change everything
Micaela law, which provides training throughout the state gender perspective, It is necessary but insufficient. In this we differ with Segato: overthrowing the patriarchy is not only about educating "gender perspective" in the institutions of the same political system that reproduces inequality and violence. Nor it is effective on "interministerial" plan against gender violence Macri announced. Therefore we demand:

Application of ESI throughout the educational system, key to preventing abuses. To this sector oppose anti-rights, as the Church and the Evangelists.

A national emergency budget anti-violence, because the current is miserly: less than a weight per woman per month. Without money for comprehensive care, houses shelter and no subsidies, no less.

Effective Law Enforcement 27.210 free legal representation to victims of domestic violence, approved 2015 but still not satisfied.

End this patriarchal justice, three urgent measures: 1) Choose judges and prosecutors by popular vote, limited and revocable mandates in case of poor performance. 2) Implement judgments by juries with gender parity. 3) Integrate women judges in all courts, from the lowest to the national Supreme Court.

Definitely, We call to fight to transform grief into strength to go for radical social change, which it is only possible through a collective and revolutionary political project.

Seals and Left-MST
1. Page 12, 16/12/18.
2. Clarion, 16/12/18.
3. This was performed until the genocidal dictatorship: the human rights movement never made vigilante justice, but always he fought for trial and punishment. The escrache was an emerging against impunity, collectively agreed.
4. Punitivista government policy that continues until today.

reproduced from Anticapitalist Network