Abstract
This article focuses on the achievements and challenges in linking research, activism and policy in the making of a comprehensive international regime on women’s human rights with a particular focus on the work of the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women. The impact of violence against women as an international policy agenda not only opened the private sphere to public scrutiny but it has also challenged mainstream human rights practice and State doctrine, and broadened and diversified feminist theorizing thereby facilitating the augmentation of the transnational women’s movement. The article argues that preventing violence against women requires a holistic approach beyond the often hierarchical treatment of rights, the selective response to the problem as belonging to the ‘other’ and the narrow perception of violence as harm done. It concludes that unless women’s agency is recognized and their capabilities supported through social, economic and political empowerment, and violence is located within the web of relations of inequality at local, national and global levels, the rights contained in international conventions, declarations and policy documents will remain unattainable for the majority of the world’s women.
Women’s engagement with the United Nations (UN) at its establishment nearly 70 years ago provided an invaluable platform for bringing women’s concerns to the international agenda. In the process, multilateral dialogue and policy became increasingly cognisant of gendered inequalities and evolved from a focus on formal equality, to integrating women into development, to empowerment and to women’s human rights – reflecting how paradigm (research), praxis (activism) and policy (decision-making) shaped one another (Ertürk, 2005; Jain, 2005; Snyder, 2006). Within the course of this arduous journey the issue of violence against women was relatively a latecomer. During the drafting of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) in the 1970s, it was not possible to include violence among its provisions, as most government delegations considered violence against women a private matter. However, references to specific types of violence, mainly in the framework of crime prevention, did exist in various UN documents (Connors, 2005).
The shortcomings of international human rights law with respect to the experiences and needs of women have been widely discussed by feminists (e.g., Askin and Koenig, 1999; Cook, 1994; Peters and Wolper, 1995). Critiques have drawn attention to the fragmented and individualistic language of the mainstream understanding of rights as well as its male (Bunch, 1995) and western (Kapur, 2002) model of the ‘human’. The international human rights paradigm with a primary concern on ‘injury’ and ‘harm done’ by state agents had been particularly blind to structural inequalities and the complex and intersecting power relations in the public and private life that lie at the heart of diverse manifestations of discrimination on the ground of sex.
Carrying the focus on violence to public attention was a viable entry point in challenging the mainstream understanding of rights and state doctrine. While it made particular manifestations of violence visible, it also demystified the taken-for-granted values and practices that regulate everyday lives. The impact of violence against women as an international policy agenda was a powerful mobilizing force, linking the local to the global thereby facilitating the augmentation of the transnational women’s movement. 1
In addition to its direct impact on strengthening the women’s human rights movement, the violence against women agenda has also had transformative outcomes in three areas: (1) expansion of human rights beyond the conventional understandings of violations perpetuated mainly by state actors in the public sphere; (2) inclusion of the actions of private individuals in the doctrine of state responsibility; and (3) introduction of new species of crimes, such as domestic violence, marital rape, stalking, etc. within the criminal justice systems.
This article focuses on the achievements and challenges in linking paradigm (research), praxis (advocacy) and policy (decision-making) in the making of an international regime on women’s human rights 2 with a particular focus on the work of the Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women (SRVAW), its causes and consequence. This mandate represents the first monitoring of human rights violations within the private sphere. In this sense its creation can be considered a critical turning point in human rights practice.
The UN mandate for the elimination of violence against women, as defined in the 1993 Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women (DEVAW), has entailed tackling the root causes of the problem at all structural levels, from the ‘private sphere’ of home to the community and the state. In her first report to the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) 3 the UN SRVAW suggested including a transnational level to capture the dynamics of the problem across national borders (Ertürk, 2004). The Declaration clearly links violence experienced by women to their systematic subordination and the historically rooted inequality between women and men, thus, qualifying the problem as one of a human rights issue. The Declaration has also called on states to meet the due diligence standards of prevention, protection, prosecution and provision of compensation in responding to the problem. 4
Perceived within such a framework, therefore, the ‘violence against women agenda’ intrinsically challenges the conventional focus on individual perpetrators and victims of violence in private life to a focus on complex social, economic and political structures that instigate violence; therefore, its elimination necessitates a shift of focus from the victimization-oriented approach to one of empowerment, i.e. enabling women to resist and escape abusive relations.
We draw upon our diverse experiences 5 to discuss the ways in which paradigm, praxis and policy are interlinked in the conceptualizations and implementation procedures with respect to the international agenda on violence against women, which has been the basis of changing practices on women’s human rights.
Research, concepts and framework in historical context
Moving intersectional concepts of gendered violence to the institutional table
The mandate on violence against women
The establishment of the UN post of Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women (SRVAW) and the appointment of an incumbent in 1994 was part of a series of developments that finally accorded explicit recognition to violence against women (VAW) as a human rights concern within the United Nations. The mandate of the SRVAW was developed within a longer history of international human rights practice and feminist activism.
In 1948, after a long struggle, people from different parts of the world adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The principles of the Declaration are codified into numerous conventions that followed; most notable are the ‘Twin Covenants’ of 1966. 6 In 1979 the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) – the ‘Women’s International Bill of Rights’ – was adopted by the UN General Assembly which came into force in 1981. Eleven years later, in 1992, after years of lobbying and advocacy by the global women’s movement, the expert committee monitoring the Convention adopted General Recommendation 19 (GR 19), defining violence against women as a form of discrimination, thus filling a major gap in the Convention. 7
Adoption of GR 19 along with the momentum behind the issue of violence provided a strong impetus to consider women’s rights as human rights at the 1993 Vienna Human Rights Conference. As a result, the international community officially recognized VAW as a human rights violation, and the same year the General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women (DEVAW). The Declaration provides the normative framework which defines violence against women and the obligation of states in its elimination. On 4 March 1994, the CHR adopted a resolution for ‘integrating the rights of women into the human rights mechanisms of the United Nations and the elimination of violence against women’, creating the post of Special Rapporteur on VAW, its causes and consequences. Three experts have since held the office of the SRVAW: Radhika Coomaraswamy, a Sri Lankan lawyer (June 1994–July 2003), Yakın Ertürk, a Turkish sociologist (August 2003–August 2009) and Rashida Manjoo, a South African lawyer, who holds the mandate at the present time.
The creation of this mechanism and the scope of its mandate was a hard-won victory for women’s rights movements globally. With the victory came the onerous responsibility upon the SRVAW for covering a vastly neglected and obstacle-ridden legal terrain – that of developing standards for distinct forms of violence faced by women because they are women, including those that are cognizant of the multilayered violations of women. In so doing the SRVAW performs three main functions: to undertake official country visits to examine the situation of women in specific contexts and make recommendations for eliminating violence as well as its root causes; to receive individual complaints and transmit them to the governments concerned; and to prepare thematic reports relevant to the mandate. 8 The SRVAW fulfils this daunting role through consultations and cooperation with governments; UN bodies/agencies and other special mechanisms; women’s groups/non-governmental organizations (NGOs); academicians; and research institutes.
This mandate is invaluable as it makes visible hidden violations, lends support to and communicates the voices of the most vulnerable women and acts as a channel to access justice and accountability where national systems of justice are not well developed or when they fail to respond. 9 Nonetheless, the challenge before the Special Rapporteur remains immense: no matter how much the mandate advances the standards, conceptual understanding and tools for implementation and accountability in relation to VAW, the problem persists because it is inextricably linked to patriarchal hierarchies and other systems of subordination and inequality that create multiple layers of discrimination for women. The unfortunate fact remains that, for the most part, VAW continues to be perpetrated with impunity, access to justice is ridden with obstacles and accountability remains elusive for many.
Conceptualizing violence
The ways in which violence is conceptualized acts as a fulcrum for effective policy and practice on eliminating violence against women. By the 1990s, feminist research had criticized and moved beyond the narrow perspective that violence is an act perpetrated by deviant individuals within households. They argued that the private and public spheres were not separate (Abraham, 2000; Ertürk, 2008a; Ferree, 1990); indeed a range of policies, institutional arrangements and practices enabled violence within private spheres. The public/private codification in international law has for long served as an ideological barrier to the human rights system from responding to the violations of rights experienced by women in private life. While the apparatus of the state has always penetrated the most intimate spheres of life, such as its promotion of the hetero-normal model of matrimony as the basis of the family institution, its policy of non-intervention in the private sphere has often been the domain of male supremacy. Therefore, the separation of spheres, far from providing a realm of privacy, has served for the selective penetration of public state hegemony while allowing some autonomous space for the hegemony of the male head of the household.
During this period, feminist research also documented the raced/gendered/classed/sexualized nature of violence, moving away from explanations embedded in culture and tradition. Feminist research pointed to the structural – political-economic – underpinnings of culture that sustained patriarchal control over women, including through the use of violence. Even as theories emphasized more complex multi-tiered structural explanations of gendered violence and linked violence within homes to violence perpetrated by communities and states against groups of women 10 – in the international human rights policy arena, there has been a general tendency to perceive violence against women largely from a victimization approach and treat it within a welfare/humanitarian paradigm. 11
As noted in the 2008 report of the SRVAW to the Human Rights Council (HRC) (Ertürk, 2008b) the general tendency of the international human rights perspective is to conceptualize violence at an individual level with an overwhelming focus on individual perpetrators and women-victims and a focus on local cultural norms as a main contributory factor of VAW. 12 As a result, the emphasis has tended to be limited to responding to violence when it occurs, i.e. protecting the victims and punishing the perpetrators. There has been relatively less work done on the more general obligation of preventing violence from occurring, including addressing VAW by supporting women’s empowerment and engaging in transformative change at the community and societal levels to eradicate patriarchal norms and values that underlie macro-structural forces of violence and the subordination of women. This is particularly interesting since the DEVAW’s comprehensive framework on VAW as ‘any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or private life’ reflects the ways in which violence is conceptualized by researchers (UN Human Rights Council, 2009) within scholarly circles.
In this respect, the SRVAWs have placed emphasis on the causes of VAW and the recognition that violence is not an isolated incident targeting particularly vulnerable women but rather an institutionalized tool of patriarchal control to keep women in their ‘place’.
Ideas to action
In order for key concepts to shape policy and action, different modes of decision-making have to be in concert with each other, but this is often not the case. Equally important, there have to be institutionally recognized actors to link mandates on violence against women to broader human rights policy agendas. The adoption of the DEVAW (1993) and the creation of the mandate of SRVAW (in 1994) are two key moments in the process of implementing practices to eliminate violence against women. However, even though the SRVAW mandate was set up, and it created the opportunity for the SR to address the General Assembly of the UN on issues of VAW, till very recently, its findings, conceptualizations and policy recommendations did not inform other UN mechanisms and bodies that deal with women’s rights and advancement. While, for instance, the VAW mandate was established within the CHR in Geneva, women’s advancement and equality issues are addressed by the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) in New York City. Finally in 2009, after years of lobbying by the SR, the Human Rights Council mandated the SR to report to the CSW on an annual basis. This has partially remedied the institutional fragmentation with respect to the UN gender agenda. 13
The challenges
Contesting hegemonic explanations of violence against women
In addition to the institutional and procedural inconsistencies there are two main substantive challenges in implementing the DEVAW and achieving women’s human rights globally. These are: cultural essentialism and an abstract understanding of human rights that is delinked from the material foundation of everyday life.
While we understand culture as ‘the set of shared spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features of human experience that is created and constructed within social praxis. As such, culture is intimately connected with the diverse ways in which social groups produce their daily existence economically, socially and politically. It therefore embraces both the commonly held meanings that allow for the continuation of everyday practices as well as the competing meanings that galvanize change over time’ (Ertürk, 2007: 8), the concept is often understood in static, essentialized ways. The term cultural essentialism is used here to describe relativist/authentic claims as well as orientalist readings of culture. That is, one variant assumes cultural traits which are deeply embedded in the established traditions of society, and there is one authentic culture – that is central to the identity and well-being of that society – that needs to be protected from outside influences. The other variant attributes regressive cultures primarily to non-Euro-American societies. Both variants tend to homogenize cultures and attribute to them static and immutable traits. Essentialized notions of culture has been used by many entities – states, groups, etc. – to justify the lack of action to eliminate violence against women or to explain the violation of women’s rights among certain groups as resulting from inherently misogynous cultures.
Feminist research, with its focus on intersecting structures of domination, offers a diametrically opposite view: there are no women qua women, but women who are shaped by their diverse social locations relative to the intersecting gender/class/race/caste/sexuality/nationality/age and other relevant structures. However, it is also important to remember that while the scholarly research conceptualizes diverse structural locations of women and their experiences of different types of cultural experiences depending on their situated context, there is a continuing normalization of violence against women, so that it is very much infused and ingrained in our historical memories, our values, our language across all cultures, in varying degrees and forms.
In all societies, culture constitutes a primary source of diverse and sometimes contradictory normative systems that provides the rationale for varied patterns of gender roles and identities, which signify relations of power. At the global level, values commonly shared by the international community have been formalized into international human rights law and other instruments, including declarations and policy frameworks. Even though these standards, which include the principle of equality between women and men as a key value, are universally accepted (formally) and legally binding, they are inadequately implemented.
Those who adhere to the cultural relativism argument to impede women’s access to human rights are generally states and other power blocs, which have challenged the universal legitimacy of human rights norms. These critics assert that international human rights norms are western in origin and therefore not appropriate in non-western contexts. 14 Such claims have provided reference points for judicial systems in excusing acts of violence against women or have helped sustain parallel justice systems that hand down severe forms of punishment to women presumed to have transgressed social norms. As a result, women’s human rights become compromised, if not totally sacrificed, in many parts of the world. 15 Violence against women committed in the name of ‘culture’, ‘custom’, ‘tradition’ or ‘religion’ continues to be prevalent as states have formally sought to opt out of specific principles of the UN human rights conventions they are party to. Moreover, the very notion of gender equality is contested when established interpretations of culture or projections of ‘their’ culture are used to justify and excuse acts of discrimination and violence against women, thus undermining the compliance of states with their international human rights obligations.
While some states have been quick to use culture as an excuse for ignoring violence against women, there is now a comprehensive international gender regime, which those very states have negotiated and endorsed. This regime provides the SRVAW with legitimate standards by which to promote in her fact finding country visits and in her annual reports. For instance, Article 4 of the DEVAW calls on states to condemn violence against women and not invoke any custom, tradition or religious consideration to avoid their obligations with respect to its elimination. States are obligated ‘to pursue by all appropriate means and without delay a policy of eliminating violence against women, which entails adopting all appropriate measures, especially in the field of education, to modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women and to eliminate prejudices, customary practices and all other practices based on inequality, ideologies of inequality or gender stereotypes’.
Parallel to the relativist arguments of culture to resist women’s human rights, there has also been a tendency in the West to essentialize cultures of the Global South as inherently harmful to women. 16 Such a process of ‘othering’ largely overlooks the cultural underpinnings of gendered discrimination in these societies. In western countries, distinct cultural norms that define gender relations are often not questioned or even perceived as culture. In some European countries, for instance, half-day schooling and rigid shop hours remain in place, which presume that ‘someone’ can take care of children and the shopping during regular working hours. These seemingly trivial cultural practices complement gender ideologies that prioritize women’s reproductive roles and reinforce, albeit in discreet forms, women’s subordination. This helps to explain why a significant number of women in the West, despite their advances in the public sphere, are still trapped in part-time employment and many still encounter intimate partner violence (Tripp, 2002).
Other seemingly non-gendered practices, such as the gun culture, also have direct consequences for gendered violence. For instance, in 2003, 50% of female homicide victims in the USA were shot and killed with a gun (Violence Policy Center, 2005). Women in the USA are 11 times more likely than in other high-income countries to be murdered through the use of a firearm (Hemenway et al., 2002). Yet, the culture of legal and widespread gun ownership, constitutionally entrenched, retains majority support. Throughout the western world, the widespread portrayal of women as sexual objects in the media and unrealistic female beauty ideals that trigger harmful self-imposed practices, which may result in life-threatening diseases such as anorexia or bulimia, are rarely seen as cultural phenomena, but are regarded as questions of market dynamics and free choice.
There are several initiatives underway by organized groups around the world to contest these essentialized versions of culture in justifying violence against women or inattention to eliminating violence against women (Ertürk, 2007). The work of the SRVAW has made visible the structural circumstances that promote a continuum of cultures of patriarchal violence including street harassment, genital mutilation, violence within families, violence in times of conflict – including genocide – and sexual violence to demonstrate how cultures converge in enforcing and sustaining control over women. 17 It has highlighted the ways in which culture-based discourses and paradigms are used to deny women equality in the enjoyment of their rights or reduce violence against women to the cultural domain. Such approaches present culture as static, homogeneous and apolitical, overlooking its diverse and ever-changing character. It must be emphasized that compromising women’s rights is not an option; the challenge is to respect diverse cultures while developing strategies to resist oppressive practices in the name of culture and to uphold universal human rights standards while rejecting ethnocentric rulings.
The conceptual shift in the response to cultural discourses by the mandate is evident in replacing the term ‘harmful traditional practices’ (HTP) with that of ‘harmful practices’. The HTP framework was developed particularly in relation to traditional cultures in the context of CEDAW. Article 5 (a) of CEDAW calls for modification of ‘social and cultural patterns of conduct . . . with a view to achieving the elimination of prejudices and customary and all other practices which are based on the idea of the inferiority or the superiority of either of the sexes or on stereotyped roles for men and women’ (UN Human Rights Council, 2009: 39).
The second substantive challenge impeding the efforts to eliminate violence against women is its treatment in isolation from the wider concern for women’s rights and equality. Despite the fact that Article 3 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) requires states to ensure women’s enjoyment of their economic and social rights, governments rarely integrate socioeconomic factors into their legislative and policy responses to VAW. ‘When one thinks of women’s human rights issues, one usually thinks about VAW and not about poverty, housing, unemployment, education, water, food security, trade and other related economic and social rights issues.’ 18 Thus the detachment of VAW within the human rights movement from the broader struggle for social and economic equality has led to its perceiving women as vulnerable victims in need of protection.
Furthermore, the tensions emanating from the dichotomization of the twin covenants on civil and political rights (CCPR) and economic, social and cultural rights (CESCR), which have privileged the former over the latter, have constrained efforts to transform the conditions that underlie gender inequality and patriarchal violence. Feminist scholars for long have criticized the conception of economic, social and cultural rights largely as ‘aspirational’ rights that can be progressively realized depending on the resources available to a state by contrast with civil and political rights conceived as ‘obligatory’ rights to be guaranteed immediately. They have argued that the fulfilment of the latter can also be seen as a process of progressive realization as both covenants impose positive duties on governments to comply with their obligations without discrimination (Elson, 2002; Nussbaum, 2005).
Women’s physical security and freedom from violence are directly linked to the material basis of relationships that govern the distribution and use of resources and entitlements, as well as authority within the home, the community, the state and the transnational realm. Cultural rationales for limiting or negating women’s rights are, thus, grounded in particular economic interests and power dynamics. A political economy perspective makes explicit the interconnections between the economic, social and political realms and demonstrates that power operates not only through coercion but also through the structured relations of production and reproduction that govern the distribution and use of resources, benefits, privileges and authority within and outside the home. It also accentuates the importance of economic and social rights and entitlements in enhancing women’s capabilities and in creating conditions for women to escape an abusive environment (Ertürk, 2009).
Overall, in its 17 years of existence, the SRVAW mandate has moved the conceptualization of violence as it was linked to culture, towards situating VAW within a global political economy that creates inequalities within which patriarchal violence is perpetrated within families, communities, states and transnational arenas. Prioritizing intersectionality and women’s human rights was a way of avoiding fragmentation and fostering effective implementation of the DEVAW. Challenging the use of culture to divide and stratify human rights of women was a centrepiece of this work. Furthermore, the SR’s report on indicators turned the attention to problems of data and measurement, and monitoring of progress in the implementation of these ‘new’ standards.
Towards success: Measurements and implementation
The emphases on individual perpetrator and victims, and the linking of VAW to an abstract notion of culture have been major challenges from a conceptual perspective, but these ideas are also entrenched through the indicators that have been used to measure violence and practices to eliminate it. Research on VAW indicates the need to document multiple types of violence; however conceptualizations are not translated into methodological processes – especially indicators that measure VAW – to shape policy and action.
The SRVAW in her 2008 report to the HRC analysed the commonly used indicators of VAW to explore the possibility of better methods of measurement. At the conceptual level such measures had to include forms of violence such as sexual harassment that had rarely been documented as VAW even though these fall well within the scholarly and activist groups’ understanding of violence as a multifaceted pattern of coercive control (Ertürk, 2008b: 12; Gumru and Fritz, 2009). The urgency of these changes are evident if we consider that most women are far more likely to experience repeated cases of sexual harassment in educational settings and workplaces than physical violence by partners in intimate settings. Most data on violence are collected through surveys, most often these surveys have sought to generate ‘prevalence indicators’ based on violence a woman experiences within her lifetime and her experience within the last 12 months. Neither indicator consistently tracks the diverse types of violence women encounter; as a result there is insufficient information to develop effective measures to combat VAW.
While the report does not claim to resolve the long-standing academic debates on how to define and measure forms of violence, it does consider issues and questions that are often neglected in efforts to measure violence against women. Drawing on the work of researchers on VAW 19 the report proposes a limited set of indicators on violence against women that allow for comparisons between countries and a more elaborate set of indicators on state response to the problem. With respect to the former, three indicators are proposed: a ‘grave violence’ indicator (covering any incident of rape/serious sexual assault/sexual coercion 20 in childhood or adulthood, female genital mutilation, child/forced marriage and trafficking); a femicide indicator which would capture women’s murder in the context of intimate partner violence; sexual murder; killings of prostitutes; killings in the name of honour; female infanticide; and dowry deaths; and an indicator tracking the degree of tolerance for violence against women. These multiple indicators 21 encapsulate diverse types of violence at different structural levels and offer a way of linking research to policies and implementation. These indicators also provide a clearer pathway for linking occurrences of violence to the parties responsible for elimination of VAW.
The indicators on state responsibility aim to measure the general trend in the way states have dealt with their due diligence obligation with respect to violence against women. Even though there are clear responsibilities set out in international law for states to prevent, protect, prosecute and provide compensation, most states continue to act, if at all, on the limited basis of welfare-of-the-individual-victim model. A state’s protective measures consist mainly of provision of services to women such as telephone hotlines, healthcare, counselling centres, legal assistance, shelters, restraining orders and financial aid to victims of violence. However, the implementation of these measures has been inconsistent and in many cases ineffective in their consequence. Protection measures are also frequently based on short-term emergency assistance rather than on sustainable solutions to avoid re-victimization. The lack of adequate enforcement by police and the judiciary of civil remedies and criminal sanctions for violence against women and an absence or inadequate provision of services such as shelters are major gaps in the current compliance with the obligation to protect.
The due diligence indicators that are described in the 2008 report to the HRC, include preventive measures such as awareness raising programmes, addressing structural inequalities in the promotion of women’s advancement and statutory recognition of non-discrimination and gender equality as well as indicators with respect to ratification of the CEDAW, ratification of relevant regional conventions, an action plan on violence against women and to institute measures so that all forms of violence against women are criminalized and treated as serious offences. In addition a series of process indicators are designed to require data and documentation of the process through which VAW is addressed at all levels – including reporting rates, decreasing attrition rates for prosecution and conviction. Victim protection and support services as well as proactive prevention and training measures are part of the due diligence indicators.
As will be evident to researchers who study violence against women, these indicators move the conceptualization of violence against women from a women-victim approach to a more holistic concept of structural violence involving a variety of institutions, including families, states and non-state actors.
The importance of these standards is immense. As Dempsey (2007) 22 has pointed out, the due diligence standards engages many hitherto uninvolved entities of the state in acting to eliminate VAW. Dempsey notes that in the Special Rapporteur’s 2006 report to the Commission on Human Rights regarding states’ due diligence obligations to eliminate VAW, the author specifically emphasizes the relevance of intrinsic value in the prosecution of domestic violence:
. . . prosecutors working on cases of domestic violence have the potential and the obligation to change the prevailing balance of power [between men and women] by taking a strong stance to disempower patriarchal notions. Interventions at this level may have both consequential effects in that condemnations of patriarchy can lead to changes in socio-cultural norms, as well as intrinsic effects, in that prosecutors . . . can be considered to be the ‘mouthpieces’ of society, and strong statements condemning violence against women made on behalf of society through the . . . prosecutorial services will make that society less patriarchal. (cited in Dempsey, 2007: 909)
Dempsey cites this report as marking an important development in the understanding of what ‘effective’ prosecution of domestic violence means. Specifically, by recognizing the intrinsic relationship between the prosecution of domestic violence and persistent condemnation of patriarchy, these standards address both the due diligence standard to prosecute harm, and breach the cultural complacency about patriarchy as part of the action to prevent normalizing of violence.
In sum, these indicators are intended to move practices on VAW beyond the victim-and-rehabilitation framework. VAW represents human rights violation, it is not simply a harm done. It arises from intersecting structural relations which makes developing indicators and quantifying violence against women a complicated endeavour. Therefore, such initiatives must be complemented with qualitative research and evidence. This is why the key issue is to redefine the concept of patriarchal violence, how it is to be documented and, more critically, how it is to be prevented before it occurs so that prevention – along with protection and prosecution – is emphasized at all levels of intervention.
A few concluding thoughts
While much progress has been made in achieving a broad and intersectional understanding of patriarchal violence in current conventions and policies the risk of a land slide remains. For instance, the Council of Europe’s (COE) Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence, after a prolonged process of negotiations and challenges by some delegations at the COE Committee of Ministers on the grounds that VAW is not a human rights issue, was finally adopted in April 2011 and opened to signature at an official launch in Istanbul on 11 May 2011. While, the adoption of this Convention is welcomed by women not only in the European region but also globally the very name of the Convention calls for some concern as it seems to distinguish violence against women from domestic violence. 23 This creates ambiguity and contradicts lessons learned so far. Such inconsistencies in the policy arena remind us about the work that still needs to be done in better conceptualizing patriarchal violence in tune with current socioeconomic-political conditions.
The role of the current neoliberal policy environment and competitive capitalism in creating new spheres of inequality or reinforcing existing ones is intimately related to, and intersects with the ways in which patriarchal violence manifests itself. Change inevitably destabilizes patriarchy as it is institutionalized through macro political-economic-sociocultural structures. The challenges to patriarchal privilege are often met with increasing the use of force.
Preventing violence against women and ensuring gender equality in a neoliberal global environment requires a holistic approach to women’s human rights beyond the current dichotomized treatment of rights, the selective response to the problem as belonging to the ‘other’ and the narrow perception of violence as harm done. The neoliberal policy environment and the proliferation of armed conflicts, often caused by struggles to control power and productive resources, have set back women’s access to such resources and increased their exposure to violence. Conflicts, as well as post-conflict and post-humanitarian crisis situations, while creating new contradictions in gender relations, often build on prevailing gender, class and ethnic inequalities – deepening some and/or creating new ones in the process. The current reconfiguration of entitlement structures, which rarely benefit women, also adds to women’s vulnerability to violence. These, along with fundamentalist movements, conservative political trends and the militarist security agendas while undermining the human rights movement also have the potential to both destabilize and reinforce patriarchal structures.
As we have emphasized here, violence against women is not merely about injury incurred by individual women. Rather it refers to a systematic abuse, which aims to sustain asymmetric gender relations and keep women in their place. Patriarchal violence is about women experiencing violence because they are women. This is a historically rooted phenomenon, which finds social approval in notions of masculinity based on policing women’s sexuality and/or on sustaining male supremacy in public and private life. The continuum of violence against women, as a method of control, and its intersectionality with other systems of oppression distinguish it from random violence or violence that occurs at a given moment or location against a marginalized group, such as the gay or a racial/ethnic group, etc.
The insights gained from the VAW mandate with respect to the dynamics of control and power must be integrated into a more comprehensive theory of violence by social scientists. In so doing, social science theorizing needs to overcome disciplinary barriers to better respond to the universalizing and particularizing dynamics of the changing world order, which have a direct bearing on violence in general and patriarchal violence in particular. The globalizing post-Cold War era has experienced major dislocations in the way social relations are articulated and governed, thus significantly restructuring power and agency. New actors, below and above the state, are now on the stage claiming legitimate representation, resulting in, as Friedman (2003) argues, ‘a range of cultural identifications that fragment and ethnify the former political units, from ethnic to religious to sexual’. Such dislocations have not only been inevitably conflictual, turning into violent internal armed confrontations, and increased violence in everyday lives, but also instrumental in transcending the claims for rights beyond the nation-state, where the international human rights system provides globally legitimate standards. 24
In this respect, sociology – which was born as a child of the industrial society to deal with the problems of nation-states – would have to move beyond current concepts of society, community, territoriality and sovereignty (Levy and Szaider, 2006), 25 and consider global security regimes and global violence in order to develop more transnationally relevant conceptions of VAW.
At the level of implementation and governance, unless women’s agency is recognized and their capabilities supported through social, economic and political empowerment, and violence is located within the web of relations of inequality, the rights contained in international conventions, declarations and policy documents will remain unattainable for the majority of the world’s women. At a more conceptual level, feminist scholars and activists alike would need to join forces to bridge the gap between the abstract/distant human rights standards, and the realities of women on the ground by developing intermediary and contextualized analytical and practical tools. At a practical level, as we have shown here, these tools have to be brought to the institutional tables in order to effect real change. In other words, more analysts need to be policy implementers and others need to find ways to make sure their analysis is heard and implemented by the policy-makers.
Whether we think of the international level or local level, we need to continually emphasize a vision for a new gender contract beyond patriarchy, which neither serves imperialist hegemony nor parochial particularism and ensure that such visions translate research into action.
Footnotes
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.