Jessica Neuwirth is president of Equality Now, an international women’s rights organization based in New York, Nairobi and London.
Marking the beginning of the annual 16 Days of Activism to End Violence Against Women , last week the Council of Europe launched a campaign to stop domestic violence and more than 20 African governments recommitted themselves to end violence against women at a meeting convened in South Africa by UNICEF. These initiatives follow the release last month of the United Nations comprehensive report on violence against women. The U.N. report repeatedly notes the connection between violence against women and sex discrimination, recognizing that violence against women is not the result of random individual acts but is rather “deeply rooted in structural relationships of inequality between women and men.” The report also notes the apparent lack of political will to take this violence seriously, even though it is both pervasive and deadly. All of the steps that should be taken by governments to end violence against women are set forth in the recommendations, none for the first time. Nevertheless, the forthright manner in which the report goes to the root causes of violence against women, and to the core necessity of political will at the highest level to end it, is a welcome breath of fresh air.
The U.N. report recognizes state responsibility for violence against women. Fatal consequences result from the culture of impunity that arises when states fail to take effective action to prevent and prosecute violence against women. As well as addressing violence at the individual and community level, the report addresses violence against women at the national and international level, noting that “the use of force to resolve political and economic disputes generates violence against women in armed conflict.” Over the past decade, the systematic use of rape as a weapon of war has been increasingly documented and for the first time effectively prosecuted by the United Nations International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda. Tens of thousands of women were raped in Bosnia and hundreds of thousands of women were raped in Rwanda during the early 1990s. The report names the various forms of physical, sexual and psychological violence that women experience during armed conflict, perpetrated by both state and non-state actors, including rape, sexual exploitation, forced marriage, forced pregnancy, forced abortion and forced sterilization.
Not surprisingly, although the U.N. report mentions Afghanistan, Burundi, Chad, Colombia, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Peru, Sierra Leone, Chechnya, Sudan (Darfur) and Uganda, as well as Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, as conflict zones from which violence against women has been reported, there is no mention of the reports of sexual abuse by U.N. personnel that have been documented by the United Nations itself . The United Nations is a microcosm of the indifference that exists around the world when it comes to violence and discrimination against women, and for the most part United Nations peacekeeping personnel have not been held accountable for acts of sexual exploitation and other violence against women, including rape.
What is clearly needed to end violence against women, in times of peace as well as times of war, is a concerted campaign of zero tolerance at the highest political level. The United Nations report is a critical first step in effectively acknowledging the failure of states to take violence against women seriously. The critical next step is in ensuring that effective action is taken to end violence against women. Having recognized the link between violence and discrimination against women, the United Nations should take concrete steps to change the global culture of sexism, which is compounded in many countries by a legal regime that imposes second-class citizenship on women through discriminatory laws. The incoming secretary-general could lead by way of example, speaking out forcefully and continually against these laws, which represent officially state sanctioned discrimination against women, and speaking out forcefully and continually against all forms of violence against women. If all acts of sexual harassment, sexual exploitation and other forms of sexual abuse by U.N. personnel were swiftly investigated and subject to disciplinary action or prosecuted, rather than being swept under the rug, the United Nations could serve as a model of progress rather than a manifestation of the universal problem.
The U.N. report recognizes violence against women as a violation of fundamental human rights and recognizes the urgent need for serious political commitment to end violence against women. As a global forum of all nations, the United Nations has the ability to mobilize effective action by its member states. Active leadership will be required, however, to ensure that this initiative is not just another United Nations report followed by yet another General Assembly resolution deploring violence against women but doing nothing to ensure that states take concrete steps to address it effectively. The campaign launched last week by the Council of Europe and the commitments made in South Africa by African governments is a promising sign that governments may be ready to take violence against women seriously.
