Ending Violence Against Women Shouldn’t Be Controversial—But it Is

@RHRealityCheck

Each year around March 8 (International Women’s Day), representatives of world governments come together to draw up a statement that is supposed to communicate the notion that women and men are equal. This has been a key tenet of international relations since the signing of the United Nations Charter in 1945, so one would think it would not be terribly controversial.

One would be wrong.

The UN Commission on the Status of Women, which has met each year since 1946, tries to set aspirational priorities for women’s equality, and it largely succeeds in doing so. However, for the past several years, members of the commission have disagreed so vehemently about what “equality” means that, in 2012, the meeting ended at an impasse. One week into the 2013 commission meetings, it seems possible that this year’s negotiations are headed down the same path. 

This is all the more frustrating because the main theme of this year’s meeting is violence against women. This is not a new, obscure issue that should require more than two weeks’ discussion to reach an agreement about steps forward. Prevent, protect, prosecute, punish—it is not that complicated.

More to the point, violence against women requires urgent attention. At least 1 in 3 women has been beaten, forced to have sex, or otherwise abused at some point in her life. Most often the perpetrator is someone she knows, and frequently it is not a one-off incident. Furthermore, domestic violence contributes to a culture of violence; boys who witness their fathers beat up their mothers are, as adults, twice as likely to abuse their own partners as those who grew up in homes without violence.

Many politicians and government officials are also complicit in violence against women. In Egypt last month, parliamentarians tried to make the sexual assault of female protesters the responsibility of the women themselves, arguing that if they hadn’t been on the streets in the first place, they would never have been groped, harassed, and raped.

In Somalia, Lul Ali Asman Barake, who says she was gang-raped by police officers, was jailed for telling a journalist about her attack. Barake was released this week, but the journalist remains in jail.

And this past Monday, Kenyans were given the option of voting for a presidential candidate who is being sought by the International Criminal Court on charges that include orchestrating sexual violence against supporters of his political opponents in 2008.

In light of this, it is perhaps unsurprising that government officials have a hard time agreeing about how, and even if, to end violence against women—after all, some of them represent leaders who believe victims are at least as responsible as their perpetrators. Indeed, Russia, the Vatican, and Iran, whose representatives have reportedly derailed negotiations the most this year, all have recent records of punishing women for speaking out, demanding justice, and simply being female.

So I am not surprised that these negotiations have not gone smoothly. I am, however, appalled. And you should be too. Today, on International Women’s Day, contact your foreign ministry or head of government and tell him or her that you expect to see an agreement in New York next week. A consensus outcome at the Commission on the Status of Women may not necessarily lead to gender justice and equality. But without an agreement, it will be clear to perpetrators that individuals in charge are not planning to clamp down on abuse.

UN Special Rapporteur: Abortion Restrictions Don't Work

@RHRealityCheck

Restrictions on abortions just don’t work in that they don’t result in the desired outcome.  This is the predictable, yet bold, conclusion of a report to be presented at the United Nations on Monday, October 24th by Anand Grover, a UN-appointed independent expert on health.  The report, which is part of an annual report-back from various human rights experts to the United Nations’ General Assembly, consolidates years of legal analysis and empirical evidence from other experts and concludes that abortion restrictions are unworkable and damaging to women’s health. Instead, the report advocates access to full, accurate, and complete sex education and information about contraception, as well as to all forms of modern contraception, because these services and state support for women’s equality actually do work to reduce the need for abortions.

Abortion restrictions are generally justified by reference to a desire to lower the number of terminations, be it by limiting access to abortion for all women, as in Chile, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, or just for the “undeserving,” as in most of the rest of the Americas including the United States. Some explicitly prefer pregnant women to die rather than having access to a life-saving abortion, but most refer to some sort of makeshift hierarchy of morals. 

“Most people, of course, should have access free of charge,” a high school friend from Denmark told me the other day. “But women who just keep having abortions: there really should be some sort of punishment for them.”

I have heard this sentiment echoed so many times.  “Seriously, I believe in access to abortion,” a young Mexican friend told me. “But really women need to show a minimum of responsibility.” This friend had, in the course of the same conversation, told me he recently had a condom break during intercourse.  When asked if he believed the woman in that case, if she were to become pregnant, had shown the requisite minimum of responsibility he was confused and horrified.  Of course she should have access to an abortion.  At least they had tried. 

These considerations about who, if anyone, deserves access to abortion are often at the core of public debate on the issue.  All but the most radical anti-choice activists would say that pregnant rape victims should have access, as well as those whose lives or health are threatened by the pregnancy.  This distinction between the vulnerable madonnas and the physically healthy sluts is, in fact, the bright line in determining public funding for abortion services in the United States today.

The truth of the matter is that abortion restrictions in law and policy have little if anything to do with how women and girls deal with their pregnancies.  Of the hundreds of women I have spoken to about their abortions, none mentioned the law as a deciding factor in whether or not to continue an unwanted or unhealthy pregnancy. Sure, the criminalization of abortion might be an impediment to getting a safe and timely abortion, but never a real barrier to getting one at all.

In fact, the only two questions policy-makers can helpfully ask themselves about their approach to abortion are 1) is it workable; and 2) does it actually work.

Most policies that allow only partial access to abortion for the “deserving” women are not all that workable. You need a process for determining the validity of rape claims, for example, and a solid definition of just how unhealthy a pregnancy needs to be to be unhealthy enough for the woman to be entitled to care.  In Ireland, where abortion is only theoretically legal for women who will die as a result of their pregnancy, a doctor asked me in visible distress: “How terminal does she have to be?  Can I help her if she has a 51 percent chance of dying, or does it have to be more?”

The notion proposed by my Danish friend—that irresponsible women who just have one abortion after another need to be punished—is equally unworkable.  How do you determine responsibility? And how many abortions are too many?  And what would be an appropriate punishment?  Carrying the pregnancy to term?  For many, the key moral question in the abortion debate is whether women who want their pregnancies terminated actually care.  But any policy based on a value-judgement on that count raises more ethical questions than it solves.  It is not workable.

Spread the word: abortion restrictions just don’t work.

The UN is a country club

(Originally posted on The Mark)

My seven-year-old daughter recently asked me to explain the United Nations to her. The best analogy I could come up with was this: the UN is like a country club. This is a disturbingly accurate description: members-only access, archaic unwritten rules, subgroups in which membership is determined by buying power, and a male-dominated culture that has withstood decades of societal development in the outside world.

But on Jan. 1, 2011, some of this is set to change. On that day, the UN will formally put into operation its first standalone entity dedicated to promoting women’s rights and gender equality: UN Women. This new body combines the work of four old entities that each carried out some part of the UN’s work on women. UN Women will be headed by an under-secretary general, who by stature is part of the UN secretary general’s cabinet. Just as important, the proposed budget for UN Women’s field-based work on women’s rights and equality is at least 10 times as high as for the previous bodies combined.

The establishment of UN Women comes on the back of years of coordinated pressure from women’s groups across the world, as well as much work by ally member states, including Canada. During the negotiations in New York, Canada’s voice was often one of the few that combined a real desire to see this entity come about with in-depth knowledge about UN budgetary and decision-making procedures. For a country where diplomats have been prohibited by their government from even uttering the words “gender equality,” that’s not half bad.

So it’s no overstatement to say that Jan. 1, 2011 is a landmark date for women worldwide. However, earlier this month, the country-club aspect of the United Nations threatened to spoil the moment by applying unwritten rules to procedures that purport to be fair.

Here's how: UN Women is set to be governed by a board made up of an elected group of UN member states, just like other separate UN entities such as the United Nations Fund for Children and the United Nations Development Programme. As per tradition, each geographic region is allocated a set number of seats on the board. In theory, regional groups are supposed to submit a list of countries interested in serving on the board to the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), which then votes on membership. In reality, regional groups tend to slug out any competition between them in closed meetings, then submit only as many country candidates as there are seats, thus rendering any later voting a sham. These pre-selected lists are called “clean slates.”

This is precisely what happened with the election of the UN Women board. As a result, two weeks before the elections, it seemed clear that Iran and Saudi Arabia – irrespective of their disgraceful track records on women’s rights – were going to serve on the board of UN Women.

Concern within the Asia group led to the submission of additional board candidates to the Asia list, and subsequently to the defeat of Iran in the ECOSOC elections. Saudi Arabia, however, will still serve, as one of two nontraditional donor countries “pre-elected” to UN Women, since there were only two proposed candidates for two seats. Saudi Arabia – a country where adult women have to seek permission from male relatives to study or work – essentially bought a place on the board of an entity whose mandate is to end gender discrimination.

That said, while unwritten procedures and buying power may have affected what were supposed to be fair and open board elections, the new entity will surely gain legitimacy and respect through its work.

So when I tell my daughter that the United Nations is a country club, I also tell her this: once in a while, some part of the organization seems to live up to the ideals the organization was founded upon: the promotion of development, peace, and equality. And then it ceases to be a country club and emerges as the forum for coordinated dialogue and action that it should be.

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.