Penny-Wise and Pound-Foolish: Proposed Funding Cuts for Response to Violence Against Women

@RHRealityCheck

This week, Senators Leahy and Crapo introduced a bill to reauthorize and amend the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), a federal law first enacted in 1994.

This is mostly good news. The VAWA mandates federal funding for victim assistance and transitional housing, strengthens provisions to penalize offenders, and requires states to provide a certain level of services with a view to preventing violence from occurring in the first place.

The bad news is that the proposed bill substantively slashes the funding for the implementation of the bill, reducing the authorized funds by more than $144 million (almost 20 percent) of 2005 levels over 5 years.

To be sure, the federal government has to save quite a lot more than $144 million to overcome its spending deficit, and Senator Leahy justified the cuts by reference to heightened efficiency through the consolidation of services.  But if it is indeed possible to consolidate services and do more with less, would it not have been appropriate to ask, first, if the current funding levels adequately cover current needs?

To start with, it is clear that violence against women in the United States has not gone away these past 20 years.  The Centers for Disease Control estimate that 25 percent of women in the United States experience domestic violence some time in their lives, and that adult women experience over 5 million instances of violent assault annually.

Adolescents—even young adolescents—are also affected.  Over 70 percent of our 7th and 8th graders report they are “dating,” and in a 2009 survey published by the Centers for Disease Control about 10 percent of students overall reported being physically hurt by someone they were dating.

In addition, the economic downturn has substantially affected women’s ability to leave abusive relationships. In the best of times, women who want to leave an abusive partner worry about finding employment and housing, especially if they also need to provide for children.  During economic crises, these concerns increase dramatically and are exacerbated by the fact that governmental and non-governmental service providers usually face funding crises of their own and may have had to cut services. 

In 2008, the National Network to End Domestic Violence found that, on one day alone, almost 9000 requests for services went unmet because of lack of resources.  In 2009, that number had increased by 300.

The National Domestic Violence Hotline, set up by VAWA, reported that calls to the hotline increased by over 19 percent in the 12 months after the September 2008 market crash.

The director of the government’s Office on Violence Against Women testified before the Senate Committee of the Judiciary in May 2010 that, between the first quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009, one shelter alone reported a 44 percent increase in persons sheltered, a 74 percent increase in crisis response, and a 124 percent increase in calls requesting shelter

But most pointedly, domestic violence costs society a lot more than the $144 million the introduced bill would save by downsizing responses to it.  Those 5 million assaults on women annually resulted in nearly 2 million injuries, of which more than half a million required medical attention, the Centers for Disease Control estimated in 2003.  Victims of domestic violence lost nearly 8 million work days and 5.6 million days of productivity due to violence.

In all, assaults on women cost almost $6 billion every year. Because these estimates are based on rates of violence before the current economic crisis, the true cost may well be higher today

In other words: the bill proposes to cut $144 million over 5 years from services that seek to remedy a problem which, even with the current government involvement, will cost society about $30 billion over that same period.

Some might say that estimates about the cost of intimate-partner violence are notoriously unpredictable, that the federal government truly is broke, or that the proposed cuts really do reflect a consolidation of services that will result in more efficient use of funds. But even if they were right, that would not take away from the fact that domestic violence is a continuing, costly, and consistently underserved problem.

Cutting federal funds for dealing with it is not only bad news, it is a bad idea.

Time to involve women in post-conflict rebuilding

@amnestyintl

These past few months have seen many advances on women’s participation in post-conflict settings; at least on paper.  

In September, female world leaders gathered in New York to speak about the benefits of involving women in politics, in particular after war. In October, the UN Security Council called for increased participation of women in conflict resolution and peace-building. Just last week, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution spelling out state obligations to further women’s participation in all settings, in particular countries in political transition.

The reality, though, is starkly different. 

On 20 October, world leaders met with the transitional government of Libya to discuss donations and support for this post-conflict counntry. In the lead-up to the donor conference, civil society and UN experts expressed deep concern about the overwhelmingly male official Libyan delegation. Some reported a push from the Libyan government to keep female civil society representatives away too.

And as we approach the 10-year anniversary of the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, to be marked with a donor conference in Bonn on December 5, it is unclear whether the Afghan government will include women in its official delegation, and whether Afghan women’s groups will be allowed to speak and participate meaningfully. The case of Afghanistan is particularly ironic because a key justification for international intervention in the first place was the Taliban’s appalling record on women’s rights. 

Perhaps we should no longer feel surprised at the snail's pace with which promises on women in conflict are implemented. Even on rape in war, arguably the least controversial women’s rights issue, individual states as well as the international community are dragging their feet.  

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. Yet it took decades of reports on vicious sexual violence in conflicts across the globe before the UN Security Council set up an office to gather information and push for action. 

Some countries that have emerged out of conflict, such as Cote d'Ivoire and Bosnia and Herzegovina, do not adequately criminalize rape in their domestic laws. More generally, the vast majority of countries fail to prosecute and address both rape and violence against women. 

Women and girls who report sexual violence face stigma, ostracism and disbelief from the authorities who fail to follow up their cases, and from their own families and communities who blame the victims for the abuse.

Yet there is something about the current climate of change that inspires hope. There is certainly a gulf of difference between the Arab Spring revolutions and the Occupy movement sweeping through the North American continent.  For one thing, while the police have almost certainly used undue force on some of the Occupy participants in New York and elsewhere, demonstrators there need not fear for their lives.  This is not the case of those pushing for change in Syria, Yemen, Egypt, Libya and beyond. 

But the call for equality is a unifying element of the demands presented by the popular movements most everywhere. Therefore, regardless of where we are and whether we feel affinity for any of these movements, as we commemorate November 25, the International Day to Eliminate Violence Against Women, let us remind each other that equality means equality for women too.   

These past few months have been big on words and renewed promises on women’s participation, in particular in post-conflict settings. While it is incumbent on all of us to make sure these promises are kept, governments have a special obligation to ensure equality.  This is true whether the government represents a country recently out of conflict, still experiencing high levels of general violence, or a peaceful country merely contemplating financial support for change.  

Change is possible.  Change that secures equality is essential.  We just have to commit to actually making change happen.

The Other Side of Reproductive Justice: How Sterilization and Other Forms of Coercion Are Used Against "Unworthy" Parents

@RHRealityCheck

Earlier this fall, a committee of the Parliamentary Assembly for the Council of Europe held a hearing entitled “Putting an end to coercive sterilizations and castrations.” This debate continues today, November 21, 2011. What is remarkable about this is not the outcome or the discussion, but rather that it was necessary at all. After all, most parliamentary debates about contraception and childbearing these days seem to be about how to make women have more children than they want, not less.

However, if we scratch the surface a bit, it becomes clear that two seemingly contradictory political discourses happily coexist. On the one hand, policy-makers push for limits to contraceptive access for women, generally speaking. And on the other, they enforce policies that criminalize, condemn, or render impossible the reproduction of specific subgroups of women (and men), who for various reasons are seen as undesirable parents: Roma women, lesbians and gay men, transgender people, indigenous women,injection drug users, women living with HIV—the list goes on.

In this connection, coercive sterilizations and castration are at the extreme end of a spectrum that also includes criminal sanctions for drug use during pregnancy and barring LBGT individuals from in-vitro fertilization services and adoption, as well as a host of other policies geared at making pregnancy and parenting difficult for those deemed unworthy. In fact, the more “unworthy” the individual or group is considered by the general public, the more explicitly coercive the measure to limit their possibility for parenting. So much so that by considering the lengths to which a government will go to prevent certain individuals from procreating, we can gauge the extent of the stigma they face.

For example, it would probably no longer be politically viable to implement quotas for the sterilization of indigenous women, as the Peruvian government did in the 1990s, yet Roma women and even just poor women are still routinely sterilized without their consent in several countries. Lesbian women are rarely forcefully sterilized, yet they are often excluded from becoming adoptive parents or from benefiting from in-vitro fertilization processes. Many countries require transgender individuals to be sterilized before they can legally change their names or papers to reflect their preferred gender, and intersex individuals are often assigned a sex—and in the process rendered infertile—as infants and certainly before they can give meaningful consent. The most restrictive and invasive intervention, forced castration, is reserved for convicted sex offenders who, in turn, arguably are seen as the most unworthy and reviled of all.

As a human rights issue, coerced sterilization and castration are in many ways no different from other limitations on individual reproductive choice: they violate a number of fundamental rights, including the rights to health, privacy, and physical integrity. Additionally, they make discrimination and public contempt visible and as such can help target policy interventions to alleviate abuse.

But a more interesting aspect of the practice of coerced sterilization is that it crystallizes the hypocrisy of the limitations to reproductive rights. When I did research on access to abortion in Mexico in 2005, for example, I found that rape victims routinely were denied services they, by law, were entitled to, whereas sex workers and women living with HIV who were applying to the same hospitals for the same services were offered abortions they did not need and that would technically have been illegal.

When Parliamentary Assembly for the Council of Europe continues its debate on forced sterilizations on Monday, it would do well to think through in what other ways it can support individual choices on when, if, and with whom to become a parent. Only just a year ago, the Assembly refused to recommend adequate regulation of conscientious objection in the medical profession, a move that probably already has contributed to the denial of care to many women across the continent.

These are not separate issues. The Roma woman who is forcefully sterilized suffers as much as the one who is denied an abortion or other needed care. Everyone must be allowed to make individual and responsible decisions about parenting and procreation.

Sexual Harassment: Not Really About Sex At All

@RHRealitycheck

This week, a national study found that sexual harassment affects about half of the students in grades seven to 12. Some might see this as an indication that there is too much talk about sex in our schools. They would be wrong. Others have chalked it up to teenage hormones and suggested that we leave well enough alone. They would be equally wrong.

Sexual harassment is nothing new. In 2008, a study found that just over a third of middle and high school students had been sexually harassed. The National Coalition for Women’s and Girls Education put the percentage at almost 90 in 1997. And, indeed, discrimination based on gender has been an actionable offence under Title IX of the Education Amendments since 1972, and since then the courts have applied Title IX to various types of sexual harassment.

But the motivation for sexual harassment seems to be shifting. Bill Bond, a school safety expert for the National Association of Secondary School Principals, notes that attempts to exploit fellow students sexually have become less common, and that now students seem to use sexual remarks to degrade or insult someone else.

This sense, that sexual harassment nowadays is more about hostility than about sex, was validated by the study published this week as well as by the study published in 2008. Both concluded that most sexual harassment in middle and high schools in the United States is directed at girls and at children suspected of being gay or lesbian.

Where straight girls are targeted, the harassment is generally about their level of sexual activity, which is either deemed too much (they are “sluts”) or too little (they are “prudes”). In the case of youth who are thought to be gay, it is the mere fact that they might even want to have sex that is “wrong.”

In other words, the more frequent type of harassment suffered by children today—and the one they report as affecting them the most negatively—is expressing hostility at children who do not fit into some preconceived notion of what “normal” sexuality is. Normality in this connection apparently means that girls must display a level of sexual activity that can go unperceived (neither too much nor too little), and that everyone should be straight.

Or to be a bit more blunt about it: sexual harassment in middle and high schools today is motivated by either misogyny or homophobia. Neither has to do with sex. And neither would be helped by treating sexual harassment between children as a result of overactive hormones to be dismissed.

In fact, the solution is just the opposite: active and broad engagement about sexuality and sex roles. Because misogyny and homophobia are fuelled by ignorance and fear. And ignorance and fear can be fought with knowledge.

Unfortunately, broad knowledge-building is not generally the objective of sex education in US middle and high schools. At best, sex education deals with sexuality as a matter of biology: how do male and female bodies engage in (heterosexual and procreative) sex. At worst, the message is that all sex is bad unless you are married and want to procreate. These types of sex education do not transfer much needed tools to our children as they grapple with their evolving sexuality. Indeed, by ignoring (or vilifying) sexuality altogether, limited sex education may instead feed the fear that expresses itself as sexual harassment.

Comprehensive sex education, on the other hand, provides the broader knowledge our children need and want. At its best, comprehensives sex education engages children on their own level of comprehension in a conversation about what sexuality means, how to relate to ourselves and each other with respect, and how to make responsible and informed choices about our sexual and reproductive lives. Comprehensive sex education not only combats the fear and stereotypes that fuel sexual harassment, it also works in terms of delaying the age of sexual initiation and lowering the number of teenage pregnancies.

All children have a right to comprehensive sex education. Giving them the information they need and are entitled to has obvious benefits for their reproductive and sexual health. It is also a way to reduce the chances that they will subject their peers to sexual harassment.

Sacrificing Women's Rights For "Popular Rule:" Why Equality is Essential

@RHRealityCheck

Over the past week Libya’s interim prime minister Abdel Rahim al-Keib has made numerous statements about human rights, at times announcing high priority to the protection of rights in his administration, at others hinting that some Libyan citizens (notably women) shouldn’t expect too much.

Judging from experiences in other countries women may not fare better after a dictatorship or autocratic rule than before it.  In 2009, Afghan President Hamid Karzai signed a bill that made women subordinate to men, allegedly in an attempt to win votes. And earlier this year, peaceful female demonstrators in Egypt were submitted to forced virginity tests and brought before a military court a full month after Hosni Mubarak had resigned.

Setting aside for a moment the question of whether the current political set-ups in Egypt, Libya, or Afghanistan are more democratic than what came before, it is valid to ask whether women’s rights often are sacrificed for the sake of popular rule.  In last month’s Tunisian election, the Islamist party Ennahda won approximately 40 percent of the votes, making many worry that this country, with arguably the most advanced legal protections for women rights in the region, might slide backwards. Others countered that Islamism and feminism aren’t necessarily opposites but can, in fact, be linked.

The truth of the matter is, however, that without certain potentially unpopular back-stops to protect the rights of the disempowered, majority rule (or ruling party rule) does not always protect equal rights for all.  Indeed in the most extreme cases, state officials accused of wanting to annihilate entire groups of people within their own country can be democratically elected.

It is noteworthy that governments seeking to limit the human rights of a particular group often use the same justifications, regardless of geography or political set up.  The two most popular excuses are these: 1) our culture does not support that kind of thing; or 2) we just have a different way of doing it. 

When the first type of justification is used—such as for example in the case of rampant and very violent homophobia in Uganda and Nigeria—any criticism is highlighted as external interference with “our way of life” and ascribed to neo-colonialism or worse. This happens whether the criticism comes from in- or outside the country itself.

When the second type of justification is used—such as for example when Princess Loulwa Al-Faisal of Saudi Arabia said that women in her country are better off than in the west because “men have a duty to look after them”—those who push for more inclusive policies are simply seen as misguided: they just don’t understand.

To be sure, notions of equality, including gender equality, as a social good have not been static throughout history and the expression of what equality looks like varies a lot even within countries.  While I believe that equality is absolutely essential to human dignity, I therefore accept that this belief has not always been as broadly accepted as it is now.  

But perhaps the more interesting question in the juxtaposition of women’s rights (or gay rights, or ethnic minority rights) and democracy is not whether some people’s rights are sacrificed for popular rule (they are), but rather whether they should be as a matter of principle (I think not).

For me this is more than just a question of conviction.  Equality has proven to be intrinsically linked to happiness, health, and peaceful societies.  In comparative studies, those societies with more equitable distributions of wealth do better than more unequal neighbors on a number of social parameters such as infant mortality, crime rates, and individual contentment.  Moreover, we already know that where violence against women surges, general violence is likely to grow too.

So next time someone questions the support for the rights of a specific group of people, you might want to ask them if they support those same rights for themselves.  Not to show them up by highlighting their hypocrisy—though that might be an added benefit—but rather to make the point that we are all interdependent. Libya’s prime minister would do well to remember that too.