International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women 2024

Isis Smyth, Liverpool Socialist Students

The cost-of-living crisis is hitting young people and students particularly hard. 25% of young people are skipping at least one meal every day, and often a lot more than that, in order to save money.

We can feel the disregard the ruling class has for the working class, and it’s vile. But even more outrageous is the double oppression that working-class women are forced to endure.

Not only are working-class women students going hungry, but they are also experiencing an epidemic of sexual assault on the very campuses of the universities leaving them in thousands of pounds in debt.

A survey by Revolt Sexual Assault in 2018 found that, of those who responded, 62% of students and graduates had experienced an act of sexual violence in universities across the UK. The fact that these were disproportionately women makes what we already know clear: sexual violence is overwhelmingly an attack on women.

Disgracefully only 2% of those felt they could report it to the universities and could say they were satisfied with the measures taken in response. Most occurrences of sexual misconduct happen in halls of residence and on-campus social spaces like student union bars. These are places where students are supposed to feel safe. And a quarter said they skipped lectures, changed modules or have taken other measures to avoid the perpetrator, with 16% dropping out of university as a result of their attack.

Women are being denied the right to safety and to higher education. A third of unis have been found to silence victims using non-disclosure agreements.

Violence against women was endemic under the Tories and Labour’s policies are going to change nothing. Keir Starmer recently pledged to halve violence against women and girls in a decade, but he is totally incapable of doing this.

Nothing on violence against women and girls was mentioned in Labour’s recent Budget and, of the minimal first steps Starmer had announced in his plan to tackle this violence, universities were not mentioned once, despite women university students and other young women being more likely than any other age group to experience sexual violence. It’s been reported that 97% of women between ages 18-24 had experienced sexual harassment or assault. When I spoke to my friends about this, a lot of them said they expected it to be higher.

Universities are run like profit-seeking companies and Starmer has no ambition to change this. To university management, the lining of their own pockets is more important than women’s safety and far too little funding is being put into keeping women safe on campus. But this is simply the reality of capitalism in which women’s bodies are objectified and commodified.

Socialist Students says that universities should be publicly owned and under democratic workers’ and students’ control. This is the only way that universities will be accessible and safe for all. We advocate for special elected and accountable committees of students and campus trade unions to oversee issues of sexual misconduct on campus.

But this alone won’t end the issue of sexual violence. Huge gains in recent decades have been won, advancing women’s rights. But the problem still persists. When the amount of sexual misconduct reports that the police and universities are receiving is growing, and when a woman is still killed by a man every three days in England and Wales – likely a huge underestimate – it’s clear that something needs to change.

Movements to tackle violence against women must be led with the understanding that capitalism is the core issue. Because women’s oppression was created in a class society, it just cannot be eradicated under one. We need socialist change to create a world where women’s safety isn’t sacrificed for profit, and where equality and peace can prevail. We need socialist change to rid the world of the dehumanizing idea that women are objects to be bought and sold, picked up and put down whenever powerful men want.

That’s why every year on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, Socialist Students hold a national day of action. So join us on 25 November to kick sexism off campus and rally in solidarity against capitalism.

  • This is adapted from a speech delivered at the Funding Not Fees closing rally for Socialism2024, 10 November, London