International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women

Every November 25th, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women calls the world to name what so many of our communities already know in their bones: violence against women is not an accident, it is a system.

At Afroresistencia, we understand this system as a web of state, economic, and structural violence that does not only target women as individuals, but entire Black communities and generations to come. Our research framework is built precisely to name, document, and confront that violence from the standpoint of Black women and femmes in the Americas, especially those whose labor sustains life in the most precarious corners of our economies.

Over the past year, Afroresistencia has carried out a qualitative, participatory study with Black women in the fishing markets and industries of Panama and Colombia. This research was led in Panama by Eusebia “Chevy” Solís and in Colombia by Angela Mañunga Arroyo, together with teams that walked the markets, listened in the ahumaderos, and sat in kitchens and community spaces where women have been holding together families, neighborhoods, and entire territories.

What we found confirms what Black women have been saying for generations:

• Gender-based violence is not isolated. It is woven into everyday life, at home, in the workplace, in schools, in health systems, in the streets, and in state institutions that should protect but instead reproduce harm.

• Racism and sexism operate together. Black women in Panama and Colombia are not only more exposed to physical, sexual, psychological, and economic violence; they are also systematically denied justice, protection, and recognition. Being Black, poor, and a woman means carrying a triple stigma that shapes every interaction with the state and the market.

• The fishing economy is a site of both exploitation and resistance. From the collection and cleaning of fish to its commercialization in informal markets, women sustain an entire chain of value that is rarely recognized as such. Their labor is underpaid, unprotected, and often criminalized, even as it feeds cities and holds together community life.

Our research documents how state violence appears not only through police, courts, or immigration systems, but also through the absence of public policies, the lack of infrastructure in markets, the failure to guarantee health, childcare, or social security, and the persistent invisibilization of Black women in official statistics. When the state refuses to see Black women, it is already committing violence.

We also show how economic violence is embedded in the very structure of the fishing markets and industries. Women who wake up before dawn to clean, smoke, and sell fish are rarely recognized as workers with rights. They are excluded from credit, from ownership of boats and equipment, from decision-making spaces, and from the profits they help create. Their income is unstable, often controlled by others, and constantly threatened by regulations and market decisions made without them.

This is not only about the present. The impacts are generational. When a Black woman cannot access dignified work, health care, or safe housing, when she is forced into informal, dangerous, and exhausting labor to survive, her daughters, granddaughters, and entire communities inherit that precarity. Trauma, especially racial and gendered trauma—does not end with one life; it is transmitted through bodies, memories, and the conditions in which children grow up. Violence against women is also violence against the future.

At the same time, our research insists on another truth: Black women are not only victims of violence; they are protagonists of resistance and collective power.

In Panama and Colombia, the women we worked with have built networks of mutual aid, community kitchens, savings groups, neighborhood organizations, and associations of women fish workers. They defend their markets as spaces of belonging and protection; they organize against unfair regulations; they care for one another’s children and elders; they transform the economy through practices of solidarity, care, and shared dignity.

Our methodological framework at Afroresistencia is grounded in this reality. We do not treat women as “informants,” but as co-creators of knowledge. Our research process has included spaces of collective reflection, healing and care days, emotional support, and a documentary photographic component that builds a visual counternarrative to the stereotypes and silences that usually surround Black women’s lives. We understand research itself as a political act: a way to confront the statistical and institutional erasure of Black communities and to demand accountability from states, markets, and international actors.

On this November 25th, we affirm:

• Violence against Black women is state violence when institutions deny protection, justice, and basic rights.

• It is economic violence when their labor sustains entire sectors—like the fishing industries of Panama and Colombia—without recognition, rights, or redistribution.

• It is structural violence when racism, sexism, classism, and transphobia intersect to determine who lives with dignity and who is forced to survive in the margins.

And we also affirm that ending violence against women requires listening to and following the leadership of Black women, especially those who have been pushed to the edges of the formal economy but remain at the center of community survival.

In the coming weeks, Afroresistencia will publish a detailed report on our research with Black women in the fishing markets and industries of Panama and Colombia, led by Eusebia “Chevy” Solís and Angela Mañunga Arroyo. This publication will deepen the analysis of gender-based, racial, economic, and territorial violence, and will also highlight the powerful strategies of resistance, care, and collective organization that these women have created.

We invite movements, organizations, institutions, and donors to engage with this work not as a story of “vulnerability,” but as a call to transform the systems that produce violence in the first place. Eliminating violence against women, especially Black women, means confronting the state, economic, and structural arrangements that profit from their exploitation and erasure. It means investing in their leadership, honoring their knowledge, and building policies and practices that guarantee not only protection from harm, but the conditions for a dignified, joyful, and free life for generations to come.