Ending Impunity for Rape

(Originally published in the Washington Post)

I have a project for Joseph Biden and Hillary Clinton to work on together: ending impunity for rape. Rape-conviction rates are appallingly low across the globe. I don't mean only in countries that many would think of as lacking good justice systems: Conviction rates hover just above 10 percent of complaints filed in the United States and are a measly 6 percent in Britain. Because the vast majority of rape victims don't file complaints, it does not take precise studies or statistics to conclude that most sexual assaults in most parts of the world end without punishment for the perpetrators. 

Over the years, in the course of my work at Human Rights Watch, I have spoken with dozens of rape victims around the world, read rape-related court files from many countries and scrutinized legislation. Although most people agree that rape is bad, legislation and government action on sexual crimes are not always that clear. Indeed, rape seems to be graded on a scale from "unconscionable" through "bad luck" to "much deserved." Exactly where a particular incident falls on that scale often seems to depend on factors that include family status, sobriety and ethnicity. In all too many cases, laws and judicial systems have determined that forced sex is not really rape.

To understand this better, consider this short list of successful defenses:

It's not rape if she is my wife. Marriage is perhaps the most commonly used cover for rape, so internalized that many women themselves seem to accept it. When I asked a woman in the Dominican Republic in 2004 if her husband ever forced her to have sex, she shrugged and said: "I guess he is a bit violent. He rapes me at times." Unfortunately, this atrocity is often sanctioned by law. Some countries, such as Ethiopia and Indonesia, define rape as something that happens only outside of marriage. In many others, rape is defined more broadly but is interpreted by courts and police as excluding marital rape. The logic can be applied after the fact, too: Several countries, including Brazil and Libya, exonerate a perpetrator of rape if he agrees to marry the victim.

It's not rape if she is my daughter. Though unconscionable to many, incest is seen in some countries as either unfortunate or not all that forced. In Mexico, for example, the rape of a teenage girl by her father is defined as voluntary until it is proved otherwise. Under most state criminal codes in Mexico, incest is considered a crime against the family, not against the physical integrity of the victim, and the underage victim is initially considered as much a criminal as the adult perpetrator.

It's not rape if she was drunk. Over the years, Human Rights Watch and other organizations have documented how prosecutors and courts are likely to treat testimony by rape victims with more suspicion than testimony regarding other types of crimes. Routinely, women are aggressively questioned about whether the intercourse was really involuntary, whether the victim somehow provoked or deserved the assault, and whether the assault even occurred. The mistrust is particularly pronounced when the victim admits to being anything other than completely sober before or during the attack. The frenzied media coverage in England last year of a controversial proposal to change the burden of proof in rape cases appeared to perpetuate the belief, which seemed to be widely held, that a drunk rape victim "had it coming."

It's not rape if my culture mandates intercourse. When the presumed next president of South Africa, Jacob Zuma, stood trial on rape charges in 2006, he bolstered his defense with references to tradition and culture. Zuma testified that his accuser had signaled her arousal by wearing a knee-length skirt to his house and sitting with her legs crossed. He said that it is unacceptable in Zulu culture not to proceed to a sexual encounter once a woman is aroused. Zuma was acquitted, but regardless of the outcome, it is troubling that a high-level politician in any country, much less a country with epidemic levels of sexual violence, peddles the notion that women may mean yes even when they say no.

Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton can change this. During his time in the Senate, Biden has championed draft legislation that would make violence against women a foreign relations priority for the United States, through, for example, supporting legislative reform abroad and a victim-centered approach to violence. As a senator, Clinton supported this legislation. As vice president and secretary of state, Biden and Clinton could make central to U.S. foreign policy the fight against perpetrators' getting away with rape and other forms of violence against women. They should start by creating a coordinating office at the State Department to build on this work. Rape is bad no matter what country it takes place in, whatever the age or marital status of the victim. There is no other way to look at it.

Abortion Rights: Back in the Spotlight

(Originally posted on the Huffington Post)

Throughout a long election campaign, the future of abortion rights and the right to choose has remained a silent concern for many women and men as the higher-profile issues of the economy and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan dominated debate. But the question on Roe v. Wade put to the presidential candidates at the final debate on Wednesday moved the issue front and center once again. It is an intensely personal and relevant issue for women, and for most of us it is not an abstraction.

It became central to my life a couple of years back, when my primary physician refused my request to prescribe the morning-after-pill, citing medical reasons that made no sense to me. I was in a better position than most women in the United States. I was in a dual-income relationship and had a steady job that serendipitously afforded me all the information I needed to assess my situation.

I knew I had a number of options. I had the resources to seek out another health care provider, and I would be able to afford a safe abortion if it came to that. The only option I had ruled out was to carry a potential pregnancy to term: we simply would not be able to afford childcare and other expenses for a second child.

This, to me, is the real question of choice. As voters in California, Colorado, and South Dakota are asked to decide on proposals that would limit women's access to abortion and contraception, there is precious little public debate on whether actually having a child is necessarily a viable choice, financially and professionally.

For many, it is not. Federal law affords just 12 weeks of unpaid maternity or paternity leave, and only for those who are eligible, which excludes about 40 percent of American workers. There are no allowances for time off to breastfeed. There are few public child care options before primary school, and even private alternatives generally will not take children under 2.

Perhaps most disturbing in terms of lack of support, 8.7 million children in the United States currently have no health insurance. In the eyes of the law, it would seem, physically giving birth is the only consideration: you are afforded a short time to regain your strength after the delivery, but are otherwise on your own.

Some -- even advocates for choice -- would say that if you plan to depend on the government, you shouldn't have a child in the first place. But this argument also presumes that if there were public health care and childcare, and provisions for family support, birth rates would shoot through the roof, draining government coffers. Experience from countries with much better maternity and child protections shows otherwise. In my own country, Denmark, there are provisions that are generous by American standards - 52 weeks of paid parental leave, child care and public health care. But the birth rate also is quite low, 1.74 per woman in her lifetime, compared with 2.1 in the United States.

Support services are not the only factor in making a choice about parenthood, but clearly in the United States, from a purely economic point of view, fertility is not a matter of choice for everyone.

In the United States the lack of support for child care and parental benefits also coexists with serious legal or financial obstacles to accessing safe abortion services and even, at times, contraception. Since 1973, both state and federal legislators have limited access to legal abortion through burdensome regulation. Women with limited economic resources face additional obstacles because abortion services have been subject to a federal funding freeze since 1977 except in cases of rape, or incest or where the mother's life is in danger. Furthermore, the majority of states do not provide health care funding for abortion services that fall outside these exceptions.

In fact, fertility (and, by extension, choice) often comes down to a class issue. While the overall fertility rate has stayed the same, the number of children living in low-income families has steadily increased since 2000. The point is not that poor women shouldn't have children, but that all women should have a real choice - and that means access to information about contraception and abortion, and the support they need to raise children.

In my case, I ended up finding an alternative health care provider, who prescribed me the morning-after-pill.

For me, this is more than a personal issue. I have made a commitment to press for a real opportunity for choice for all women, including access to safe abortion services for poor, adolescent, or otherwise vulnerable women.

But choice also requires science-based sex education, contraception, maternity and paternity benefits, and access to child care and health care. The rationale behind polices such as Denmark's is that rearing a child is a service to all: reproduction, at its most basic, is the reproduction of society. Both the personal and the collective nature of that choice need to be protected by law and defended by the next president.

Rape in War: Will the United Nations Walk Its Talk?

(Originally posted on RH Reality Check)

On June 19, 2008, the United Nations Security Council made history by declaring that rape in war is such a bad idea they plan to do something about it.

That's right. After decades of reports on vicious sexual violence in conflicts across the globe, the highest decision-making body of the United Nations has decided that it is time to act. In fact, no other international actor has as much power to do something about rape in war, and as disappointing a record, as the United Nations Security Council.

It is not that the Security Council hasn't talked about the issue before. In 2000, the Security Council -- under intense pressure from women's groups and UN field personnel -- established a link between the Council's mandate and the way in which women and girls are affected differently by conflict than men and boys. This link is contained in a resolution, known mostly by its number (1325/2000), which includes an urgent call to end impunity for sexual violence and for the United Nations system to gather information on issues related to women and girls in conflict and report these to the Security Council.

Action to back up these good intentions has, however, been scarce. Every year in October since 2000, the Council has celebrated the anniversary of resolution 1325 by announcing the importance of the gender perspective in its work, and then proceeded to largely ignore it for the rest of the year.

Up until last Thursday, that is. On Thursday, the Security Council declared its readiness to act on sexual violence in a resolution that contains three key components:

1. The resolution establishes sexual violence in conflict and post-conflict as a topic within the purview of the Council's work. "Obviously!" you might say, and you'd be right. There is no conflict in recent history where women and girls have not been targeted for sexual violence, whether as a form of torture, as a method to humiliate the enemy, or with a view to spreading terror and despair. If that's not potentially relevant to the protection of international peace and security, what is? But the inclusion of this clause is essential because some members of the Security Council, in particular Russia and China, at times have portrayed rape in war as an issue that doesn't deserve the Council's attention. With the new resolution, they will no longer be able to do so.
2. The resolution creates a clear mandate for the Security Council to intervene, including through sanctions, where the levels or form of sexual violence merit it. Again, this might seem self-evident. The Security Council is mandated under the UN Charter to address situations that present a threat to international peace and security. It has the power to chastise countries waging war without proper cause -- notably, not in self-defense -- or by illegal methods, such as the use of child soldiers and, indeed, using rape as a weapon of war. Despite this mandate, the Council has so far done little to prevent or punish states for rape in war. In fact, it would seem it at times has consciously avoided doing so. This was, for example, the case during the July 2007 discussions regarding the mandate-renewal for the UN mission in Côte d'Ivoire. Despite having received information regarding intolerably high levels of sexual and gender-based violence in that country, the Council did not empower its field staff to address the violence.
3. The resolution asks the Secretary-General to provide a comprehensive report on the extent to which the resolution has been implemented, as well as on his views on how to improve information flow to the Council on sexual violence. This is tremendously important. In the past, the prevalence and patterns of sexual violence have barely featured in the reports the Council commissions and receives from the field offices of the United Nations. This is in part because the Security Council until now more often than not didn't ask for such information to be included in the reports. This crucial failure has been addressed in last Thursday's resolution, which asks for information on sexual violence to be included in all reports. Still, the UN system may in many cases not be equipped to gather information on sexual violence in conflict-affected situations in a consistent and ethical manner. This is a root cause of the lack of Security Council attention to sexual violence. And last Thursday's resolution asks the UN Secretary-General to propose a lasting solution.

Thursday's debate and the resulting resolution also added a new word to the Council's sometimes dusty vocabulary: never before has a Security Council resolution called on parties to "debunk" myths that fuel sexual violence. But the historic contribution of Thursday's debate was to "debunk" the Council's own and self-perpetuating myth that sexual violence in conflict simply didn't happen because it didn't feature prominently in UN reports to the Council -- which, in turn, had been commissioned without seeking to elicit any information or insights on rape in war.

Of course, any UN resolution is only as good as its follow-up. In fact, it is possible that the Security Council's until now tepid attention to sexual violence in conflict-affected situations is a symptom of a more onerous problem: a deep-seated reluctance to address rape at all, mirroring the failure of national governments to prosecute and address violence against women more generally. Moreover, the UN system cannot change overnight: while it is now legally empowered to provide information on sexual violence in conflict situations, it still needs to be appropriately structured and resourced to do so. This requires investment in training and service-provision, and it requires the prioritization of this issue at the highest level: field missions, UN agencies, and peacekeeping troops should be evaluated, amongst other things, on the effectiveness and ethics of their approach to sexual violence. It is incumbent upon UN members states, Security Council members, UN agencies, and civil society to make sure this happens. The road was paved last Thursday. Now it's time to see if the United Nations can walk the walk.



Do or Die: Learn to Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Piece

(Originally posted on the Huffington Post)

I am a failure. Not because of an early divorce, or a failure to learn Chinese. Not even because, after 15 years abroad, I sometimes sound like a foreigner when speaking my native Danish language. All of those things, while potentially uncomfortable or painful, are the consequences of choices I have made. I am a failure because I have not been able to create equality in my own relationship -- despite being defined by my business card as a "women's rights advocate."

There are excuses. Equality takes time. There are social pressures involved. I have done better than my mother, even though she tried. I can't blame it all on my co-parent. He is not opposed to sharing the reproductive work -- we just can't seem to get the logistics right; what with two working adults and a child to rear in the urban jungle of cut-throat "equality" that is New York. So I'm a qualified failure -- I fail at equality in part because equality is failing me.

These excuses do not get rid of the frustration. But coming out as a failure allows me to deal with whatever obstacles to equality depend solely on me. This is why I recommend the same honesty for the United Nations.

The United Nations was created in 1945 with a stated objective to put into practice the shared principle that men and women are absolute equals. Since then, only three women have been elected President of the UN General Assembly, and none have served as Secretary-General. The organization has established agencies and offices for dealing with sex-based discrimination, but has provided them with grossly inadequate funding and virtually no political influence.

In other words: the United Nations sees itself as a women's rights advocate, yet like me, it has failed to create equality at home. The excuses are the same: time, social pressure, gradual improvements. But the real issue is that the organization must own up to its failure on women's rights. It is time to change.

This impetus for truth-telling, self-flagellation, and change in the area of gender equality is probably the least publicized part of the ongoing UN reform process. Yet it is also the one that has the potential of affecting the most people -- a little over half the world's population -- and it might already be under way. Next week governments from all over the world meet at the UN Commission on the Status of Women to discuss how to finance most effectively for equality.

The conclusions of this event could signal a new start for the United Nations in the area of women's rights. The laundry list of concerns is endless, but here are my top three personal recommendations:

* Power to act. It's not enough to say you want equality -- you need the power to do something about it. The United Nations has an abysmal record on this: of the 1,300 UN positions that state gender concern as part of their job description, 1,000 are junior positions with little decision-making or implementation power. Most deal with "gender" as only part of their job.

* Leadership. Last year, the United Nations selected another man with no discernable women's rights experience as its Secretary-General. The Commission on the Status of Women will contemplate whether women's rights are important enough to create an Under-Secretary-General position to head such concerns. It's not only important, it's essential.

* Resources. The budget of the (also under funded) UN children's agency, UNICEF, is about 40 times larger than that of the UN development fund for women, UNIFEM. UN reform experts have called for vastly increased funding for women's rights, though still only a fraction of what is routinely shelled out for peace-building, children's rights, and other equally important issues. Money isn't everything, but in this context its absence is significant. It spells a lack of commitment. The question shouldn't be: are women's rights really worth it, but rather: why have we been shortchanged for so long.

And it's not like there isn't enough to do.

Take violence against women. At least one in four women suffers violence at the hands of her husband or intimate partner. Sexual violence against women and girls has, especially in conflict areas, reached epidemic proportions. In 2006, the General Assembly set out a road-map for how the United Nations and its member states should prevent and punish violence against women. This year, the Secretary-General has launched a global campaign on this issue. But without reform and resources, the UN system will not be able to deliver the information and programs needed to bear out these good intentions.

Or how about maternal mortality? Every year over half a million women die as a result of complications related to pregnancy and childbirth. Some 8 million women a year survive such complications, but end up with life-long health consequences. The UN Millennium Campaign has gathered expertise on how to all but eliminate maternal mortality. Yet without a well-resourced women's agency empowered to help governments implement the needed reforms, our knowledge about how to save women's lives will be mostly academic.

Whether the reforms succeed will depend on one thing: does the United Nations -- or rather, its member states -- possess the political will and stamina to implement them? Perhaps looking critically at the status of equality at UN Plaza will inspire some action. It certainly helped me.

Access to Contraceptives Promotes Abortion?

(Originally posted on the Huffington Post)

In the last five years, I have interviewed hundreds of women in developing countries regarding their access to reproductive health care. To the best of my knowledge, President Bush has not.

I would expect to be in disagreement with his administration's often demonstrably unscientific approach to family planning. However, President Bush's claim this week that giving poor women access to contraceptives promotes abortion defies logic. In a policy statement released by the office of the president on June 19 the administration has declared the president's intent to veto a bill authorizing foreign aid for family planning programs, because, according to the statement, the bill would be contrary to the administration's Mexico City Policy (also known colloquially as the "Global Gag Rule").

The administration's analysis of this issue is not only fundamentally flawed, it is also dangerous. Here's why. The Global Gag Rule restricts U.S. foreign aid to non-U.S. based organizations that (with non-U.S. funds) provide legal voluntary abortion services or advocate for less restrictive abortion laws within their country.

The Global Gag Rule is not about whether U.S. foreign aid is used to fund legal abortion services directly -- such funding has been illegal since 1973. That is, the Global Gag Rule expressly denies funding to organizations who even with their own alternative funding refuse to be silent on the devastating consequences of the criminalization of abortion on the lives of women or who simply provide reproductive health services that are fully legal.

A brief history of the Global Gag Rule is that it was first enacted by the Reagan administration; was repealed by the Clinton administration in 1993; was reintroduced by Congress in the foreign aid appropriations act (with a waiver system) in 2000, and was fully reinstated by President Bush as one of his first acts of government in January 2001.

The local health providing organizations de-funded by the Global Gag Rule (those who refuse to be "gagged") often give services spanning the full spectrum of family planning: information on contraceptive methods, youth counseling to postpone sexual initiation and prevent adolescent pregnancies, as well as the provision of condoms, diaphragms, and hormonal contraception.

Rather than preventing abortion, the real effect of the Global Gag Rule has therefore been a drop in access to reproductive health services, information, and modern contraceptive methods. These are all services primarily to women that have been proven to bring down the number of crisis pregnancies, and therefore abortions.

In short, the Global Gag Rule is bad foreign policy and bad for women.

The foreign aid bill President Bush is now threatening to veto contains a provision stating that organizations who apply for U.S. foreign aid cannot be denied funding specifically destined for the provision of contraceptives solely on the basis of the Global Gag Rule.

With this provision, Congress seems to be saying that improving access to contraceptives might give poor women a better chance to avoid using-often unsafe-abortion as their only means of family planning.

With his promised veto, President Bush is saying the opposite: that contraceptives promote abortion.

President Bush should explain this twisted logic to the many women and adolescents who -- as a result of this administration's sustained war on family planning and scientifically based health information -- will face unsafe abortion, lasting health consequences from early pregnancies, and even possible death. President Bush would certainly benefit from contact with the millions of people his policies affect.