Key Challenges for the Elimination of Gender-Based Violence

Confronting gender-based violence raises certain problems that set it apart from other kinds of human-rights abuse. For example, when the perpetrator of violence is an outsider, community support usually can be mobilized to fight it. But how can people be persuaded to stop accepting or condoning violence committed by friends and relatives? Further, many human-rights abuses are amenable to legal remedies within the present structures of the law. But the law is not a neutral force in patriarchal societies. How can power holders be motivated to acknowledge, and ultimately relinquish, their own stake in practices that reinforce male control?

These questions point to three key challenges that should inform the policies and practice of women's movements - and the agencies that support them: to find ways to deconstruct traditional power structures and cultural assumptions that sustain continuing gender-based violence; to bring pressure on both the state and community to assume responsibility for eliminating gender-based violence and to hold them accountable if they do not; and to ensure that programmes aimed at promoting sustainable human development include a gender dimension as a critical feature in its formulation, design and implementation.

Running through all of these is the question: What does it take to make local communities and national governments decide that it is their responsibility to prevent such violence? This requires a profound shift in people's attitudes, away from individual blame towards holding an entire community accountable for gender-based violence. Significant change will occur only when the community is seen as responsible for the violence that it has promoted or tolerated by failing to intervene. That approach has been successfully promoted in zero-tolerance campaigns, such as the one that took place in Scotland a few years ago.

A critical element in any strategy to eliminate violence against women is a community's decision not to tolerate violence - either by strangers or by its own members. As a UN expert group recommended in 1993, acceptance within the community of the responsibility to shame persons publicly who commit such violence can be an effective preventative measure.² In order to make this possible, however, it is first necessary to break the silence - to encourage women to speak out and protest the violence in their lives, both personal and public - as many of the chapters in this volume demonstrate. While empowering individual women is an important strategy to reduce women's vulnerability to violence, however, it is not by itself sufficient. Even women who are able to gain enough control over their lives to avoid situations of domestic violence remain vulnerable to violence in the public sphere - either from individual perpetrators or in some cases, from gangs, militias, the police, and even the military.

^2. Report of the Expert Group Meeting on Measures to Eradicate Violence Against Women, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 4-8 October 1993, p. 5, issued by the UN Department of Policy Coordination and Sustainable Development.

Communities need models and mechanisms for dealing with violence against women that occur within their own boundaries. Moving towards community responsibility requires strong and enduring community-based organizations, especially but not exclusively women's organizations. Accordingly, national governments and the international development and human-rights community should explore to what extent these groups need assistance in incorporating the eradication of discrimination generally and gender-based violence specifically into their work strategies. Development initiatives should reinforce structures, control mechanisms, or associations - whether formal or informal - that are capable of delegitimizing violence as a means of conflict resolution in the family or in the community.

Creating a sense of public responsibility for gender-based violence also involves examining the ways in which institutions in society currently condone such violence, either actively or by passively looking away.

Schools, religious institutions, workplaces, social clubs, and families, along with the advertising and communications media, must be challenged about their tolerance of, and thus collusion in, the perpetuation of violence against women. The establishment and promotion of uniform international standards of state responsibility and of mechanisms for international monitoring can play an important role in changing institutional structures and practices.

Some may argue - even within the human-rights community - that the state should not intervene in what are considered private or domestic matters. But the state is always involved, explicitly or implicitly, in gender-based violence, both by way of laws and policies that encourage or discourage such violence and by the efforts it exerts or fails to exert to implement those measures. But as one expert notes, "Gender relations are already regulated by states, through fiscal arrangements, social security, immigration law, and marriage and family law, established religion, military service, and executed through all the statutory instruments, administrative procedures, and legal and judicial processes, as well as the executive and elective bodies. It is the duty of 'good governments' to enforce respect for women's human rights within them."³ State accountability for actively seeking to eradicate violence against women is based on the state's universally recognized responsibility to respect and ensure the fundamental human rights of all individuals in its territory.

^3. Georgina Ashworth, "Women and Human Rights," background paper for DAC Expert Group on Women in Development, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Paris, May 1992, p.22.