Violence Against Women: A Human Rights Issue

• Author: Gaietry Pargass and Roberta Clarke
• Pages: 39-72

Violence Against Women 39

INTRODUCTION

Increasingly, over the past decade, women have focussed public debate on

the issue of gender violence and human rights. Gender-based violence has

been defined by the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination

Against Women as ‘violence that is directed against a woman because she is

a woman or which affects women disproportionately’. Violence against

women in all its manifestations or the threat of violence violates the

fundamental human rights of women including the right to life, the right

to equality and the right not to be subjected to torture or other cruel,

inhumane, or degrading treatment or punishment. The fear of violence

permeates women’s daily lives, curtailing their freedom of movement and

limiting what they do.

This notwithstanding, the conventional understanding of human rights

violations as occurring only at the hands of state actors, precluded a

consideration of violence against women perpetrated by private actors within

the human rights discourse. The abuse of women was viewed as a cultural,

private or individual issue and not a political matter that required state

action. Women sought to dispel this notion and to convey that the issue of

gender violence is profoundly political and results from the structural

relationships of power, domination and privilege between men and women

in society.1 Within the Caribbean, Clarke notes that violence against women

Violence Against Women: A Human Rights Issue

Post Beijing Five Year Review

Gaietry Pargass & Roberta Clarke

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40 Gaietry Pargass & Roberta Clarke

is embedded in the context of cultural, socioeconomic and political power

relations. Caribbean societies, apart from being cleavaged by class and race

divisions, are organised around hierarchical gender power relations with

male domination reducing women to economic and emotional dependency.2

In the 1990s, a host of initiatives were taken by governments responding

to regional and global advocacy on the need for state action in the elimination

of all forms of violence against women. In many ways, this advocacy finds

its origins in the enunciation and elaboration of the right to non-

discrimination. In 1979, the UN General Assembly adopted the Convention

on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women

(CEDAW). The Convention, whilst generally recognised as spelling out

internationally accepted principles and standards for achieving equality

between men and women, does not expressly address the issue of violence

as a form of discrimination against women.

However, the Nairobi Forward Looking Strategies for Women to the

Year 2000, the conference document of the Third World Conference on

Women (1985), identified violence against women as an issue requiring

priority action and called upon governments to intensify efforts to establish

or strengthen forms of assistance to victims of such violence through the

provision of shelter, support, legal and other services. Governments were

called upon to increase public awareness of violence against women as a

societal problem and to establish policies and legislative measures to ascertain

its causes and to prevent and eliminate such violence.

Subsequently, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination

Against Women, issued General Recommendations 12 and 19 on ‘Violence

against Women’. These recommendations require states to protect women

against all forms of violence and further, require states to include in their

periodic reports (which states undertake to submit following ratification of

the Convention) information on the legislative and other measures taken

to address the issue, the support services available, and statistical data on

all forms of violence against women. The Committee adopted its General

Recommendations 12 and 19 in 1989 and 1992 respectively. All

CARICOM governments have signed and ratified CEDAW and are therefore

bound by its provisions and by General Recommendations 12 and 19.

Consideration of Recommendation 19 led to a more concrete description

of state obligations of conduct through the United Nations Declaration on

the Elimination of Violence Against Women which was adopted by the

United Nations general assembly on December 20, 1993. Within the

Caribbean, and most particularly in the period of the Fourth World

Violence Against Women 41

Conference for Women, a number of countries enacted protective legislation

and started more systematic police training programmes.

In 1993, the Programme of Action adopted by the World Conference

on Human Rights and accepted by participating governments, recognised

that gender-based violence and all forms of sexual harassment and

exploitation, including those resulting from cultural prejudice, were

incompatible with the dignity and worth of the human person. At that

conference, recommendations were made for the appointment of a Special

Rapporteur on Violence, its Causes and Consequences. Radhika

Coomaraswamy (Sri Lanka) was appointed Special Rapporteur in 1994

with a mandate to collect and analyse information on violence against

women and to recommend measures aimed at eliminating violence against

women at the international, regional and national levels. The Special

Rapporteur has thus far focused on violence against women in the family

and in the community and violence perpetrated against women by the

state or its agents.

Within the Organization of American States, the Inter-American

Convention on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence

was adopted by the OAS General Assembly in June 1994. The OAS

Convention not only recognises that violence against women constitutes a

violation of human rights but it also defines violence in both the public

and private spheres. By May 1996, Guyana, St Kitts and Nevis, St Lucia,

Barbados, Dominica and Trinidad and Tobago had signed and ratified the

Convention and by November 1999 a further seven Caribbean States

including Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Belize, the Dominican Republic,

Grenada, Haiti, St Vincent and the Grenadines had ratified the OAS

Convention.

The Beijing Platform for Action continued the human rights analysis of

the issue of violence against women with the explicit statement that, violence

against women both violates and impairs or nullifies the enjoyment by

women of their human rights and fundamental freedoms. Participating

governments, including Caribbean governments, agreed that the long-

standing failure to protect and promote those rights and freedoms in the

case of violence against women is a matter of concern to all states and

should be addressed and committed to undertaking a series of comprehensive

measures outlined in the document for its prevention and eradication.

At the formal level therefore, Caribbean governments may be said to

have accepted that violence against women constitutes a violation of

fundamental human rights requiring state action.