TABLE OF CONTENTS Special Issue: 1. Sheila Dauer………………………………………………………… 1 INTRODUCTION: ANTHROPOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO GENDER-BASED VIOLENCE Anthropological Approaches to 2. Melissa A. Beske……………………………………………………. 16 Gender-based AN ANALYSIS OF THE COLLABORATIVE ENDEAVORS TO LESSEN Violence and GENDER-BASED INTIMATE PARTNER VIOLENCE IN CAYO, BELIZE, AND A CASE FOR ANTHROPOLOGICAL ENGAGEMENT Human Rights 3. Janet Chernela ……………………………….……………………. 34 PARTICULARIZING UNIVERSALS/UNIVERSALIZING PARTICULARS: A COMPREHENSIVE APPROACH TO TRAFFICKING IN INDIGENOUS WOMEN AND GIRLS IN THE NORTHWEST AMAZON OF BRAZIL 4. Rebecka Lundgren and Melissa K. Adams……………….……… 53 SAFE PASSAGES: BUILDING ON CULTURAL TRADITIONS TO PREVENT GENDER-BASED VIOLENCE THROUGHOUT THE LIFE COURSE 5. Shannon Speed …………………………………………………….. 78 A DREADFUL MOSAIC: RETHINKING GENDER VIOLENCE THROUGH THE LIVES OF INDIGENOUS WOMEN MIGRANTS Working Paper #304 June 2014 Gender, Development, and Globalization Program Center for Gender in Global Context Michigan State University 206 International Center 427 N Shaw Ln, East Lansing, MI 48824-1035 Ph: 517/353-5040 • Fx: 517/432-4845 Email: [email protected] • Web: http://www.gencen.msu.edu See back page for ordering information and call for papers Copyright © 2014 MSU Board of Trustees Introduction: Anthropological Approaches to Gender-based Violence Sheila Dauer Graduate Program in International Affairs New School for Public Engagement Biography Sheila Dauer is the former Director of Amnesty International USA (AIUSA)’s Women’s Human Rights Program during the program’s existence from October 1997 to December 2008. She was on the staff of AIUSA from 1979 to 2008. As a charter member of an AIUSA Taskforce on Women’s Human Rights since 1988, she worked with both AI’s international research office and other national sections to develop AI’s policy, action, and publications on women’s human rights. In 1991, she prepared AI’s first international report on women’s human rights, Women in the Front Line. She served as Theme Advisor to AIUSA’s Stop Violence Against Women Campaign (2004-2008), developing strategies and actions on multiple countries and issues around violence against women. Dr. Dauer, who holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology, carried out fieldwork for two years in Tanzania. She is an emeritus member of the American Anthropological Association’s Committee for Human Rights and a Fellow of the Society for Applied Anthropology. She teaches at The New School for Public Engagement’s Graduate Program in International Affairs and Columbia Teachers College. - 1 - INTRODUCTION Gender-based violence against women is one of the major challenges to social justice and human rights in the 21st century. The important work of anthropologists contributes to recent advances both in ways to understand gender-based violence in ethnographically accurate terms and ways to work with the community to end these abuses. This special issue represents the work of four anthropologists who use and further refine the concept of gender-based violence within the international human rights framework through their ethnographic research. All of the authors have identified forms of gender-based violence carried out against women or girls and engage with the goal of lessening and eventually eliminating this violence. Their work expresses the influence of feminism in both anthropology and human rights. During the 1970s through 1990s, partly due to the UN Decade on Women (1975-1985) and four World Conferences on Women ending with Beijing in 1995, women’s movements organized transnationally to introduce the concept of gender into the human rights regime and to identify a relationship between subordination of women and their vulnerability to forms of violence. Using Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), the women’s rights treaty, and the human rights framework as an organizing tool, women raised awareness of forms of gender-based violence committed by private actors in the home and community that are ignored or condoned by government and that present a major obstacle to equality. CEDAW had not discussed violence explicitly. In 1992, the CEDAW Committee issued General Recommendation 19 to close this gap. This document made clear that gender-based violence breaches the Convention and declared that government “is responsible for private acts if they fail to act with due diligence to prevent violations of rights or to investigate and punish acts of violence and provide compensation.” In order to obtain broad UN recognition of this definition of government’s human rights responsibility, a transnational coalition of women’s organizations used the occasion of the 1993 2nd World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna to mount a campaign with the slogan, “Women’s rights ARE human rights.”1 They succeeded in that the final agreement—the Vienna Declaration—states that women’s rights are an integral part of all human rights, that equal participation of women in all areas of life is a priority of the UN and that violence against women is a human rights violation for which governments can be held accountable if they do not exercise due diligence to prevent and punish it. In addition, the UN General Assembly approved a Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women and appointed a Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women (VAW) to report on gender-based violence and its causes and consequences to the UN Human Rights Commission. During this same period, feminist anthropologists developed the distinction between sex and gender—the idea that biological differences between men and women do not solely underlie social definitions and that attributes and behaviors associated with women are culturally and historically specific—and they applied this gender lens to anthropological theory.2 By 1988, the Association for Feminist Anthropology (AFA) became a permanent section within the American - 2 - Anthropological Association (AAA). In 1989, the AAA institutionalized recognition of feminist anthropology when it published Gender and Anthropology: Critical Reviews for Research and Teaching, edited by Sandra Morgen. The resulting ethnographic research led to, among other things, the understanding that gender can intersect with race, class, and other forms of difference and that these intersections transform the nature of gender. Ethnographies of culturally specific masculinities and femininities around the world (e.g. Lancaster and DiLeonardo 1997) revealed the widespread presence of gender- based violence against women (Brown and Campbell 1992; 1999; Counts 1990; Das 2008; Goldstein 2003; Levinson 1989; McClusky 2001; Merry 2006; Parsons 2010; Plesser 2006; Wies and Haldane 2011).3 Anthropologists working globally became interested not only in studying forms of gender-based violence but in highlighting the “persistence yet invisibility of sexual violence” in the belief that ethnographic research and exposure could lead to amelioration of the problem (McChesney and Singleton 2010, 1). Anthropological approaches to violence against women describe cultural beliefs and norms and the political, economic, and social structures that underlie tolerance of violence against women. With their depth of knowledge about a society, anthropologists offer culturally resonant ways for ideas about protecting women from gender- based violence to be introduced into social discourses in that society. ANTHROPOLOGY AND HUMAN RIGHTS Anthropologists have been characterized as hostile to the human rights framework. For example Radhika Coomaraswamy, UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women (1994-2003), criticized the academic discipline of anthropology for inventing and encouraging cultural relativism which has been used as a rationale by government and community leaders to reject women’s human right to be free of violence in the home and community (2002). This history of this criticism begins as a result of early opposition in 1947 to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. At that time, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) responded to the newly formed UN Human Rights Commission that the proposed Universal Declaration on Human Rights was in danger of being ethnocentric, expressing ideas of “rights conceived only in terms of values prevalent in the countries of Western Europe and America.” Further, they noted that “in stressing these particular absolute values it could be used to justify colonialist doctrines such as the ‘white man’s burden’ – a doctrine used to implement economic exploitation and to deny the right to control their own affairs to millions of people over the world” (AAA 1947). Anthropologists have long stressed the importance of ensuring that cultural relativism not be applied only to societies in the Global South but also to societies in the Global North that have morally questionable cultural practices, such as racial violence and discrimination, repression of minorities, gender-based discrimination and violence, and destruction of the environment vital to a people’s survival. Many anthropologists remain skeptical about reform efforts that call for changes in cultural practices without sufficient respect for the history and context of those practices – whether these efforts are neo-colonial, further globalization, or advocate human rights.4 - 3 - A significant initiative within the AAA to explore human rights began in the 1980s with an increasing concern about the gravity and urgency of human rights violations affecting peasant, indigenous,