The Politics of Gender Equality and Violence and Women
by Anu Pillay
Violence Against Women
Violence against women is both a cause and an effect of gender inequality.
Addressing it intersects with a duty to address gender, race and disability
inequalities, in fact all other inequalities. We therefore must also engage with
diversity such as faith, age, sexual orientation, location and so on. Those of us thus
charged with these duties (particularly government) must therefore strive to:

Eliminate unlawful discrimination and harassment and

Promote equality of opportunity between men and women
All countries who have signed up for these principles and made it part of their
constitution are therefore subject to the duty, under the law, which requires them to
be proactive in demonstrating that they treat men and women fairly. Given that
violence against women is rooted in gender inequality, achieving equality between
men and women is fundamental to preventing and eliminating it. Addressing violence
against women, while a moral imperative in its own right, is an indicator for public
authorities, working individually and in partnership, for meeting their gender duty.
Violence against women is fundamental to the gender equality duty as women are
disadvantaged disproportionately because of the violence they experience,
predominantly from men. It does not mean that all services need to be equally
available to men and women. Services must take account of the particular needs of
those who are disadvantaged. It does not mean that women-only services are
discriminatory. The emphasis is on equity rather than 'same'.
In 1995, The IV World Conference on Women held in Beijing, China produced the
Beijing Platform for Action which gave recognition to Violence Against Women as a
serious threat to development. It was a groundbreaking document that laid the
foundation for many significant initiatives, including Masimanyane Women’s Support
Centre, to be born. Over the years, since 1995, those of us working at the coalface
as practitioners, have borne witness to the changing terrain of this sector and
experienced the many forms of resistances or backlashes. Five years after at the
Beijing +5 conference, there was already a significant shift and we found ourselves
having to defend the ground we had gained in Beijing. Beijing +10 was a disaster
with many of the gains lost. Violence against women had been diluted to Genderbased violence and then sexual gender based violence which now included violence
against women resulting in much confusion and territorial power plays. Now we are
at Beijing +15. I recently came across this article in the UK news:
Shadow Home Secretary and Minister for Women, Yvette Cooper has learnt that the
Government is trying to weaken and dilute international action to protect women from
domestic and sexual violence, despite the Home Secretary’s claims that violence
against women is a priority.
In the same week that Theresa May is publishing a government strategy on violence
against women, Home Office officials are proposing amendments to water down the
Council of Europe convention on violence against women – including on rape during
war and conflict situations and treating violence against women as a violation of
human rights.
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This comes at a time when domestic and sexual violence organisations are
struggling to keep support services open due to the scale of government funding
cuts, and the complete removal of DNA for those arrested but not charged looks set
to make it harder for the police to achieve rape convictions.
What is this resistance / backlash really about? After Beijing, we all, especially us
here in south Africa, really thought that we had political will to end violence against
women. 16 years later, we have to concede that this is not the case. Ending violence
against women means that we have achieved gender equality and achieving Gender
equality means that power is being shared equally by all parties at all levels, be it
class, race or at any other level. With such high levels of contested powered, it is
highly unlikely that those who are benefiting from some, many or all of these
inequalities will readily give them up. Like democracy, gender equality is not
something that can be achieved. It is an open-ended struggle with violence against
women set as the strongest indicator of progress. We should never take our eyes off
the ball and allow this issue to be diluted or watered down. Many organisations
addressing VAW are being asked to look at issues of gender and climate change,
gender and service delivery, gender and poverty. These are all very significant areas
of work but they distract us from the lived realities of the everyday violence that
women are vulnerable to and to which many are subjected to on a daily basis.
We must therefore, now allow ourselves to be distracted and keep focused on the
issue of violence against women as the strongest indicator of our movement towards
gender equality.
Concerns that have been raised about focusing on VAW have been that:

Men are excluded and it ignores violence against men

Focusing on violence against women will dilute efforts on domestic abuse

The agenda is too big

Lack of resources

Lack of capacity in the VAW sector
Focusing just on domestic violence is not viable within the current context. It
obscures the links between different forms of violence; denies a good service to
women who experience more than one form of violence; and limits the effectiveness
of prevention work which is predicated on the principle that violence against women
is culturally damaging to all members of society.
The focus needs to be on women because they are, overwhelmingly, the victims of
men's violence. This is not to deny that there are other forms of interpersonal
violence and abuse, some of which are based on the abuse of power and privilege.
All forms of violence need to be taken seriously but this does not detract from the
importance of tackling violence against women. This cannot be overstressed.
Renaming VAW, gender based violence has seriously detracted from working on the
issues that were raised in Beijing even though it was done with good intention which
was to bring in the power dynamics between men and women and to understand the
link between violence against women and gender equality. However, it has gone
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horribly wrong now and we need to keep our focus on the indicator for GE which is
VAW.
Violence against women is a large agenda. Because of that and because as I said
earlier, it is open ended, we expect to take an incremental approach and to build on
the past and current gains. Prevention and reduction of violence against women are
thus the key objectives. Prevention work lends itself to application across the wider
spectrum of violence against women.
A feminist analysis of Capacity Building in the VAW sector.
The terror of Professionalisation
Part of the backlash or resistance that we have been facing has been the forced
professionalization or technocratisation of the work. I have been particularly struck by
this in my work in Liberia. Emerging from about 20 years of conflict and open war,
the pressure on women’s organization to ‘professionalisation’ and develop the
technical expertise that is demanded has been phenomenal. After taking up the job
at medica mondiale, I remember that when I was told by our partner organization that
our staff were computer illiterate and could not produce a decent report, I asked if
they had been hired as computer technicians or as counselors?
From a feminist perspective, where feminism values collaboration, collectivity,
participation and inclusivity and is focused on empowerment, the focus on technical
expertise undermines and devalues the social and humanitarian aspect of the work
that we are actually being called and paid to do. Granted these things are very
important, but if success and progress is going to be measured by how well we write
reports and whether or not we are able to match our more sophisticated male
counterparts who can show tangible products at the end then we are bound to faill.
So the question is, how is professionalism being defined? And by whom? Are we
being evaluated on the technical expertise that we have to produce reports and fancy
audits or does the humanitarian, social work that we do count for more? I think it is
time to put things into perspective. Although technical expertise and operational
systems are very important to the success of a project, far too much emphasis is
placed on this at the expense of monitoring the quality of human interaction and
service delivery.
Liberia
The emergency situation placed a huge pressure to deliver services very quickly.
This meant that there was very little time to train people properly and there is a
feeling that ‘anything is better than nothing”. I am not so sure about that. A lot of
damage can be done by an untrained lay person who goes in to help without
knowing the limits of what can and cannot be done.
What we did at medica mondiale was to assess the quality of what was being offered
and design a contextually relevant training manual which we have field tested with
our staff over a period of one year. What we included in that training programme
which was underpinned by a feminist trauma sensitive approach are modules on self
care, self reflection, transformation (meaning total change and embracing of new
ways of being with each other) community mobilization, empowerment,
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understanding of feminism and gender. We pitched this at two levels, basic and
advanced taking into account that many of the community leaders and volunteers on
our programme are semi to illiterate.
This is what we defined professionalism and capacity building to mean – that the
service deliverers are empowered to take care of themselves as well as others and
who have the requisite training and knowledge to do the job at hand to the best of
their ability. For them to model the qualities and ways of being that we were
introducing to the communities within which they were working.
Understanding Gender
The term gender has been a bone of contention for many years now and it has not
improved. It has caused so much confusion that in Liberia, it has come to mean that
equal numbers of men and women must participate for programmes to be said to be
gender sensitive. It means that violence against men is being taken into account and
brought to the gender coordinators of the ministyr of gender and development and
more and more men are being employed to run gender programmes. This is a
complete misunderstanding of the term and how it is meant to be used. It
undermines anys efforts to correct the inequality between the sexes and serves to
further disempower and marginalize women. It has led to men’s programmes being
set up, run by men to deal with the issue of genderbased violence . The focus on
women is lost when this happens and once again, the issue of violence against
women takes a back seat.
When men get together to create a programme to deal with GBV what they actually
create is a power block that attracts funding. Of course they run their programmes
well. With their background of social networks, social capital and years of training
and preparing for power and leadership why would they not be excellent at project
management and produce excellent reports on time? But do they change women’s
lives? Do they actually bring about a shift in consciousness about gender equality
where women participate freely and equally at all levels of social life?
So, since Beijing, a lot has changed and much has remained the same and some
has gotten worse.
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