Rethinking "Gendered" Violence

For Day 15 of the 16 Days of Activism, guest blogger Amanda Blair presents a thoughtful post on gendered violence and justice. Reposted from http://chicagofamilyplanning.wordpress.com/2013/12/09/rethinking-gendered-violence/ 

The inclusion of women’s human rights into international law signifies a global shift from historical subordination to the recognition of women’s experiences. National, transnational, and international advocacy movements have been successful in including women’s human rights as a topic on the political agenda, as well as obtaining special legal protections specifically designed to accommodate the needs of women. However, regardless of the advancements made concerning women’s human rights in international legal frameworks, women continue to experience violence and be discriminated against for biological (during pregnancy and childbirth), gender (as mothers and nurturers), and sexuality (non-heteronormative sexual behavior) based differences (Miller 2000, and Edwards 2010, 19).

The 16 Days of Activism Campaign highlights the ubiquity of gender-based violence, and calls for individuals and communities to mobilize and address the shortcomings of international law. Through local, national, regional, and international efforts the goal is for women’s human rights to be recognized and respected at all levels of society.

Three major feminist movements challenged the notion that gender-based violence was a private or domestic concern, and argued, rather, that issues of gender-based violence are of public or political concern and require legal protections. First, starting in the 1970s, U.S. feminist activists worked to include crimes of domestic violence, sexual assault, and sexual harassment into penal code. In 1993, the last state, North Carolina, removed the spousal exemption for crimes of sexual assault, marking the end of a two-decade movement.

The second major campaign grew out of the United Nation’s world conferences on women, which advanced the claim that women’s rights are human rights. The result was the ratification of the Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination against Women (1979) and Optional Protocol (2000), and the creation of the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women position to monitor violence against women worldwide.

The third major advocacy movement was in response to large-scale perpetration of sexual violence during the armed conflicts in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the early 1990s. Feminist legal advocates insisted that women’s experiences of sexual violence during armed conflict be included into existing humanitarian law. The movement successfully generated three United Nations Security Council Resolutions (1325, 1820, and 1888), which address the specific needs of women and girls in armed conflict, and during peace negotiations and processes of post-conflict reconstruction. Additionally, international criminal tribunals and transitional justice mechanisms prosecuted sexual violence as a war crime, as a crime against humanity, and as a component of genocide.

The achievements of these movements are commendable. Each movement successfully employed gender strategizing based on sustained sexual difference. In other words, these movements emphasized that women experience violence differently than men, and that legally, it should be recognized as such. Sex-specific agendas upheld that women were disproportionately victims of sexual violence compared to men, and designated crimes of sexual violence as a violation of women’s human rights (Quinjano 2012, 155-67).

However, we know that women and girls are not the only victims of gender-based violence, and it is “impossible to confirm without comparable data on the victimization of men and boys” whether women and girls comprise the majority of victims (Carpenter 2005, 296). Framing gender strictly as sexual difference excludes the reality that men and boys are also victims of gender-based violence, including sexual violence. In additional to sexual difference, gender is socially and culturally constructed, and organized in power and control relationships that privilege particular individual and collective identities over others. For violence to be gendered, it mustn’t always imply sexual or sexualized violence; gender-based violence includes all forms of violence that disproportionately affect men or women, or in other words have a gender bias.

Men and boys are subjected to gender-based violence in intimate relationships, in custodial institutions, in the military, during armed conflict, etc., and experience violence perpetrated by both men and women. While forced pregnancy, maternity, and abortion are forms of gender-based violence that are also sex-specific to women, other forms of gender-based violence such as torture, mass killing and death, forced recruitment, and selective detention, disproportionately affect men.

While participating in the 16 Days of Activism campaign, it is crucial that we remember that gender-based violence does not equal violence against women, and it is extremely contradictory to exclude male victims when advancing claims about gendered justice.

**TRIGGER WARNING**

Video: Gender Against Men (An advocacy-oriented documentary exposing the hidden world of sexual and gender based violence against men in the conflicts of the Great Lakes Region of Africa. Produced by the Refugee Law Project.)

Click here to watch the full version

Amanda H. Blair is a fourth-year doctoral student at The University of Chicago specializing in the field of Comparative Politics. Her current research focuses on the discursive constructions of conflict-related rape in the Sierra Leone civil war and the Rwandan Genocide, and effects of the exclusion of male victims and female perpetrators from armed conflict analyses of rape.