http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/11/30/ending_violence_against_women.phpMarking 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.
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