Tackling Violence Against Women: a Worldwide Approach Published by WOMANKIND Worldwide © WOMANKIND Worldwide 2007
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Tackling Violence against Women: A worldwide approach Published by WOMANKIND Worldwide © WOMANKIND Worldwide 2007 WOMANKIND Worldwide Development House 56-64 Leonard Street London EC2A 4LT www.womankind.org.uk UK Registered Charity No. 328206 Cover photograph: Women from WOMANKIND partner organisation DEMUS march through Lima on an 'End Violence against Women' demonstration. 2 Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 3 FOREWORD 5 WOMANKIND’S APPROACH 5 INTRODUCTION 7 VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN — THE FACTS 8 USING A RIGHTS LENS 9 LEGAL INSTRUMENTS AND FRAMEWORKS 11 EDUCATION AND PREVENTION 12 WORKING WITH MEN AND BOYS 13 INTEGRATED COMMUNITY APPROACHES 14 SOUTH AFRICA — GENDER ADVOCACY PROJECT 15 CULTURALLY APPROPRIATE RESPONSES 15 PERU — A VIOLENT LEGACY 16 ACCESS TO JUSTICE 18 GHANA — NKYINKYIM PROJECT 19 WHAT IS CULTURALLY ACCEPTABLE? 19 MEDIA & CAMPAIGNS 20 DEFINITE IMPACT 21 POLICY AND INFLUENCING 22 WHAT LIES AHEAD? 23 REFERENCES 24 Acknowledgements WOMANKIND Worldwide would like to thank all those who contributed to this report, in particular our partner organisations whose inspirational work makes this publication possible. Special thanks to those whose testimonies we’ve quoted, who will help others tackle violence against women around the world. 3 ‘Violence against women is perhaps the most shameful human-rights violation. And it is perhaps the most pervasive. It knows no boundaries of geography, culture or wealth. As long as it continues, we cannot claim to be making real progress towards equality, development, and peace.’ KOFI ANNAN 4 Foreword Efforts to tackle violence against women have PARTNERSHIPS WORLDWIDE evolved over the years and there is now increased visibility of the problem and greater WOMANKIND works in partnership with women’s organisations around knowledge and awareness of its causes and the world. We do not have offices in consequences. But huge challenges remain. developing countries, nor do we seek The scale of this global phenomenon is to impose a one-size-fits-all model of development onto our partner enormous, but the level of investment in organisations; rather we fund and suitable interventions and the political will to support them to find solutions to the tackle the problem remains low compared with problems they face in their communities. We also run a responses to other human-rights violations. programme of work in the UK with a Aside from the devastating impact on the focus on promoting the inclusion of lives of women and their families and work on violence against women and girls as a key part of young people’s communities, the pandemic threatens to education. We facilitate learning undermine efforts to bring about sustainable between partners and across development. In this report WOMANKIND programmes — and harness this learning to strengthen our work and Worldwide draws on examples and lessons its impact. We also support our learned, with its international partners, that partners to lobby and advocate for can help women — and men — across the change at all levels, from the local council up to the UN decision-making world put into practice various strategies to body. Our policy work is informed by tackle violence against women (VAW) the reality of the challenges ordinary effectively — and to illustrate the urgent need women face in their day-to-day lives. The organisations we support vary for violence against women to be tackled as greatly in size, capacity and the part of a broader human-rights and social- contexts in which they work, but what justice agenda. we all share is a firm commitment to ending discrimination against women and a belief that women, when given Sue Turrell the opportunity, can be a powerful Executive Director force for change. 5 6 TACKLING VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN A WORLDWIDE APPROACH Introduction The impact of violence against women is now well documented. It denies women their most basic human rights, such as the right to health, and is a major threat to the social and economic development of communities and whole countries. In development terms, it directly endangers the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals related to gender equality and women’s empowerment, poverty reduction, infant and maternal health and mortality, educational attainment and combating HIV and AIDS. But despite recognition within the development community of the Little has urgent need to tackle violence against women, millions of women around the world continue to suffer violence in the home and in the been done to community, with devastating physical, emotional and psychological tackle the effects.1 underlying Advocates for women’s rights have campaigned hard over the years causes — the to bring the issue of violence against women to the world’s attention. imbalance of As a result of their efforts, a number of States have taken significant power between steps at the national level towards the eradication of violence against women. However, these steps have primarily focused on women and improving laws relating to violence against women. Far less has men been done to enforce legislation and to tackle the underlying causes of the problem — the imbalance of power between women and men and the way in which gender roles are articulated at all levels of society. WOMANKIND’S approach WOMANKIND (WK) works in partnership with organisations around the world to tackle violence against women through a range of initiatives and interventions — from prevention work in schools in the UK to integrated community responses challenging the practice of female genital mutilation (FGM) in Ethiopia. Our work recognises that violence is a universal phenomenon, but that women in general and some distinct groups of women may be TACKLING VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN A WORLDWIDE APPROACH 7 VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN — THE FACTS There is an urgent need for more accurate data and statistics about the scope and prevalence of violence against women — to support meaningful and targeted responses. This is mainly as a result of under-reporting, under-estimation of the scale of the problem and a lack of commitment to addressing the issue in a comprehensive way. But the statistics that are available still paint a devastating picture of the harmful effects of violence against women: Q Violence is as serious a cause of death and incapacity among women of reproductive age as cancer — and a greater cause of ill-health than traffic accidents and malaria combined. Q Approximately one in five women becomes a victim of rape or attempted rape in her lifetime. Q More than 130 million girls and women alive today have undergone female genital mutilation (FGM), mainly in Africa and some Middle Eastern countries2, and two million girls a year are at risk of mutilation. Q Rape in South Africa has reached epidemic proportions — women’s groups estimate that a woman is raped every 26 seconds and a child every 15 minutes. Q The economic cost of violence against women is considerable — a 2003 report by the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that the costs of intimate partner violence in the United States alone exceed US$5.8 billion per year. Source: www.unifem.org/gender_issues/violence_against_women/facts_figures.php particularly vulnerable to violence, such as women living in poverty, widows, indigenous women, disabled women, women in detention, women in situations of armed conflict and women living in rural or remote communities. Our focus is on tackling violence against women, since we recognise that, while men and boys may be the target of gender-based violence and women may also be the perpetrators of gender-based violence, women constitute the vast majority of people experiencing gender-based violence and men the majority of perpetrators. However, our work is also based on an understanding that women and men must work together and involve the wider community in order to bring about lasting change in the attitudes and behaviours which perpetuate all forms of gender-based violence. The principles and standards set out in international human-rights instruments, in particular the UN Convention for the Elimination of 8 TACKLING VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN A WORLDWIDE APPROACH Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the Beijing Platform for Action (BPFA) provide a global framework for this work that cuts across cultural, religious and national limitations. In this report, you will read about some of the strategies WOMANKIND Worldwide and its partner organisations have used to tackle violence against women, within a broader framework of challenging inequality and unequal power relations between women and men. We highlight the challenges and opportunities posed by the multiple strategies WOMANKIND and its partners are employing to tackle Women and different forms of violence against women in a range of contexts. men must work together and Using a rights lens involve the As an organisation working to promote women’s rights and gender wider equality, in addition to fighting poverty, WOMANKIND is particularly community in interested in the intersection between violence against women and other women’s human rights. order to bring about lasting In our experience, a rights-based analysis can help to provide an understanding of the often complex linkages between women’s change in the experience of violence and the denial of their social, economic, attitudes and political and legal rights. By highlighting the indivisibility and behaviours interconnected nature of the full spectrum of women’s human rights as set out in international human-rights treaties, we are able to look which at all the factors impacting on women’s lives and to respond perpetuate all accordingly. forms of For example, many of WOMANKIND’s programmes to tackle gender-based violence against women are complemented by work to challenge violence. women’s exclusion from public life — and increase their participation in decision-making processes at all levels. This has been shown to decrease their vulnerability to violence by helping them find support and solutions to the problem, such as legal protection, counselling and advice.