Agenda Setting, the UN, and NGOs: Gender Violence and Reproductive Rights

4. Women’s Rights as Human Rights: The Case of Violence against Women

4 WOMEN’S RIGHTS AS HUMAN RIGHTS The Case of Violence against Women Violence against women has been a global problem for millennia. Throughout the world, women have been battered, abused, tortured, raped, and even killed simply because they are women. Around the world, at least one in every three women has been beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused by a man in her lifetime, and among women age fifteen to forty-four years, gender-based violence accounts for more death and disability among women than the combined effects of cancer , malaria, traffic injuries, and war (UNIFEM 2006b). Only the types of violence to which women are subjected vary across regions and countries. In India more than five thousand brides are murdered or commit suicide every year because their marriage dowry is consideredinadequate (Women’sLearningPartnership2001;seealsoJaising 1995andKelkar1992).Inmanypartsof Africa,Asia,andtheMiddleEast, every day six thousand girls are subjected to a practice euphemistically referred to as “female circumcision”—the cutting off, often without anesthesia, of the female genitalia including the clitoris (Amnesty International 2006). This mutilating operation, which is supposed to increase women’s fertility, affirm girls’ femininity, and prevent stillbirths, has severe long-term health implications for most women, such as chronic urinary and pelvic infections, painful menstruation and intercourse, and even infertility (Toubia 1995). In China the ratio of sexes is significantly off-balance due to the country’s strict one-child population policy and 103 the greater value placed on boys by society. The census for 2000 revealed that, contrary to the biological norm of 100 newborn girls to 103 boys, the ratio in China was 100 to 119 (Vlachova and Biason 2005, 6). The statistics for industrial countries are no less chilling. In the United States, every nine seconds a woman is battered by her domestic partner (Women’s Learning Partnership 2001) and seven hundred thousand women are raped or sexually assaulted each year, with 14.8 percent of women reporting having been raped before the age of seventeen years (Krug et al. 2002, 151). In a study conducted in Finland in 1998, 29 percent of the women reporting had been victims of sexual violence or the threat of such violence since the age of fifteen or had been forced to have sexual relations (European Women’s Lobby 1999, 28). And in a survey conducted in Canada in 1993, one in four women reported experiencing sexual or physical violence in the context of an intimate relationship with a man (European Women’s Lobby 1999, 25). Data suggest that throughout the world, the home is by far the most dangerous place for women and frequently the site of cruelty and torture . Out of ten countries surveyed in a study of the World Health Organization on women’s health and domestic violence in 2005, more than 50 percent of women in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Peru, and Tanzania reported having been subject to physical violence by their intimate partners. Women in Japan encountered the least violence, with 15 percent reporting it, but the proportion reached a staggering high in rural Ethiopia of 71 percent (WHO 2005, 5). However, the incidence of sexual harassment in the workplace reminds us that gender violence is by no means confined to the private realm.Noristheperpetratoralwaysaprivateindividual.Duringwarand civil conflict, women and girls are often targeted for special forms of violencebymenasawayof attackingthemoraleof theenemy.Inmanyof the ethnic wars that have occurred since the end of the cold war, systematic and planned rape was used as a weapon of war and genocide against women and their families. In Rwanda, for example, up to half a million females were raped during the 1994 genocide. In the wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, the number was as high as sixty thousand, and in SierraLeonetherewereasmanyassixty-fourthousandincidentsof warrelated sexual violence among internally displaced women from 1991 to 2001 (Vlachova and Biason 2005). In East Timor almost every adolescent girl who had survived the genocide in 1994 had been raped, and estimates suggest that at least one thousand women were raped during the postreferendum conflict of 1999 (UNIFEM 2006a). 104 Chapter 4 The universality of the problem as well as the inaction on the part of many governments have prompted women to organize internationally . Their campaign concerning the issue of gender violence can be divided into three phases: (1) the 1970s, when a small group of women organized an international tribunal bringing together women from over forty...