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Hilkka Pietilä, M.Sc.
Women, Men and Peace-Perspectives
Presentation in 600th Anniversary of the Kalmar Unionen,
23.05.1997 in “Kalmar - Capital of the North 1397”
VIOLENCE IS AN ENEMY WITH MANY FACES
- HOW TO DEFUSE THIS ENEMY?
New Challenges to the Peace Movement towards 21. Century.
Around the Baltic Sea we have now quite another world than what it used to be for
decades. The profound transformations which have taken place in Europe are
particularly spectacular in this area. Here we experienced very concretely the
contradictions of the former situation, and now we see the positive and negative trends
in the new situation.
Now it appears as if the two opposing power blocks had also positive influences on
each other, as long as they were ideological competitors. Both blocks were very
concerned about their image and made strenuous efforts in order to show their best
faces to each other and the rest of the world. This “beauty contest” kept the ugliest
elements of both systems mutually in discipline - or hidden.
All countries in transition
Now there is no balancing factor any more. The wild market forces no longer need to
worry about their image and credibility. It is believed that they have the monopoly of
the only workable system in the universe.
In the Nordic countries the values of democracy, solidarity, equality and justice are
gradually eroded, albeit having been the corner stones of the whole Nordic welfare
society. They have given way to deconstruction of the welfare system in the name of
economic integration and competitiveness in foreign trade.
In the Baltic states and Russia the unabated market drive has replaced the socialist
system and so far there are very few mechanisms to control its drawbacks.
These transformations are part of the economic globalization in the world. It implies
intimidation of the political systems and transition of power to faceless economic
structures all over. European economic integration is the process of implementing this
transition at the European level, and not an effort to control it, as it is often claimed.
The issue at stake is power in the global economy. Which one of three rich blocks will
be ruling, the NAFTA of North America, the EU in Europe or the APEC in South East
Asia?
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Now the issue is the economic war between these three power blocks and at the same
time a world war by all rich industrial countries together against the rest of the world.
In fact it is war against the poor, weak and disabled in all societies and against living
nature.
The institutions of the UN system have warned of the consequences of the economic
policies of multilateral banks, transnational companies and industrial states, but the
warnings have not been heard. The globalization process proceeds towards more
liberalization and free movement of capital and goods. The neo-liberal economic
structures are gaining strength.
No arms race but market race
Now there is no “arms race” but a “market race” instead, the rule of free competition
in everything, not only in business. Instead of a balance of terror we have the terror of
the markets, which forces everybody to compete with everybody. The so-called
accountability by results is applied to everything, even in fields where it absolutely
cannot fit, like hospitals, nurseries, schools and universities. Thus it is not too rough to
speak about the “terror of money”.
It is obvious that in those circumstances the rich, strong and well-equipped will always
win, become richer and stronger, and the small, weak and poor will become poorer
and more exploited. The disparities between people and nations are growing, and
structural violence is increasing.
The rules of competition and the glory of the winners are propagated with all means.
All competitive sports serve this purpose by making heroes of those who are ready to
win at any price - without any other merits whatsoever. They are glorified as heroes,
although competition and winning always implies leaving somebody else behind,
pressing another one down, manifesting the disgrace of the other. Competition is the
square opposite to cooperation, solidarity, helpfulness, support and love.
In the mass media everyone who succeeds in making a lot of money, constructing
magnificent edifices of any kind or performing anything “terrific”, will be celebrated
and made famous, irrespective of his morals, conduct, or the purpose of the edifice!
Violence increasing
The automatic result of uncontrolled market capitalism is the growth of structural
violence, disparities, inequality and injustice in life and societies. It initiates disruptive
behaviour by those who cannot win, who are condemned to fail, lose, and live in
uncertainty. Deterioration of culture and erosion of social structures will very likely
start breeding violence, criminality and despair.
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This is exactly what we have seen happening when poor countries are exposed to
international trade competition and structural adjustment measures of the World Bank
to the detriment of their people. This is part of the background in the situations of
Somalia and Rwanda, recently in Congo, and there are others at the edge of
catastrophe. The impact of globalization, policies of rich countries and global
enterprises wreaks the worst damage in the most vulnerable countries and societies.
The arms race was threatening and frightening, keeping us all in fear. The market race,
the pressure for competition and striving for competitiveness are comprehensively
destructive, less frightening but very intrusive. They can easily make us slaves of the
market, totally dependent on the one hand on labour markets and on the other hand on
commodity market, helpless and powerless pawns in our own lives.
Violence has many faces and we should not shut our eyes to the grim and gloomy
realities around us.
Violence against women - an issue of Peace
Violence against women is a universal phenomenon, which has been with us since the
beginning of times. It has ranged from the public and collective practice of raping
women in wars to the private, intimate practice of violence within the family,
including rape in the bed room. Yet it has been most efficiently silenced, excluded
from all scientific and historical records.
The feminist peace movement has made connections between various forms of
violence already from its beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In those years
women’s peace movements articulated, in many ways and many situations, that they
see little difference between one form of violence and another. They perceived a direct
link between violence in the family, on the streets, rape and militarism, all of which
stem from the same origin, the patriarchal culture, where competition and violence is
built into the structure and nature of it.
In early 1980s feminist peace researchers like Betty Reardon, Elise Boulding, Robin
Burns, Birgit Brock-Utne, Ellen Elster, Cynthia Enloe, Celina Garcia, Dorota Gierycz,
Eva Nordland and many others made an impact on the women’s peace movement and
peace research and brought new perspectives into discussion.
It was due to these women’s work that the new ideas found their way also into
intergovernmental resolutions. The Forward-Looking Strategies for Advancement of
Women, adopted unanimously in the third United Nations World Conference on
Women in Nairobi 1985, is the very first UN document in which all UN member
governments recognize the links between the use of violence at personal and
international levels.
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“The question of women and peace and the meaning of peace for women cannot
be separated from the broader question of relationships between women and
men in all spheres of life and family.” (Paragraph 257)
“Violence against women exists in various forms in everyday life in all societies.
Women are beaten, mutilated, burned, sexually abused and raped. Such violence
is a major obstacle to the achievement of peace and other objectives of the (UN)
decade (for Women).” (Paragraph 258, UN/FLS, 1985)
These paragraphs expand the perspective of peace to cover the whole of society and
culture, not only relationships between states or conflicting parties within societies.
This approach implies also that work for the elimination of violence against women is
an important part of work for peace in general.
The attention given to violence against women has been expanding in the UN system
ever since. By far the most important act so far is the adoption of the Declaration on
the Elimination of Violence Against Women in December 1993. The definition of what
is meant by "violence against women" in this Declaration is very important and
clarifying:
“Violence against women' means any act of gender-based violence that results in,
or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to
women including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty,
whether occurring in public or in private life."
This declaration transgresses right from the outset the threshold between ‘public’ and
‘private’, which until lately has been - and still is in many countries - the limit of the
mandate of public laws.
Rape as a war crime
In 1992 the extreme atrocities in the former Yugoslavia brought rape also on to the
agenda of the UN Security Council for the first time in UN history.
The Security Council was "appalled by reports of the massive, organized and
systematic detention and rape of women, in particular Muslim women, in Bosnia and
Herzegovina", and strongly condemned “these acts of unspeakable brutality".
In spring 1993 the Security Council also decided "to establish an international tribunal
for prosecuting persons responsible for serious violations of international humanitarian
law committed in the territory of the former Yugoslavia". The mandate of this tribunal
includes also the "massive, organized and systematic detention and rape of women".
These resolutions by the General Assembly and the Security Council are immensely
important steps on the way to making violence against women officially visible. In fact
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the Security Council has with this resolution also recognized rape as a war crime for
the first time in history.
Still, these important UN resolutions are problematic in their approach. They name the
victims, "women", but do not say who are the ones committing the violence against
women and why.
Therefore big questions arise along with this progress in the elimination of violence
against women: Will it ever be possible really to eliminate violence against women as
long as male culture as such continues to be that violent as it is? As long as men among
themselves consider beating each other an act of manliness, and consider aggressivity
an admirable characteristic in the eyes of their fellow men? As long as war is still
legitimized violence in the patriarchy?
Social pathology of male culture?
However, in Nordic countries even these kinds of questions no longer remain only
rhetorical ones, or to be taken as nasty remarks against men. They are already tackled
seriously by men themselves.
The work dealing with violence among men, both conscientization and research, has
taken place in Nordic countries already for some time, in Norway for around 20 years,
in Sweden somewhat later and in Finland even later.
In January 1997 the Swedish Ministry of Labour held in Stockholm a conference on
the theme “Är våld manligt?” (Is violence manly?), as one event to implement a new
approach to the issue. There they were mainly men who discussed the subject. And the
answer to the question was mostly “Yes”, but a yes with a serious and questioning
tone, not blaming and reproaching.
From women’s point of view it is a decisive step forward when it is realized that the
issue of violence against women is not “a women’s issue”. It is first and foremost an
issue of men, male culture - but in fact it is an issue of our culture as a whole. Why
does our culture bring up men in such a way, that they exert and commit so much
violence against each other and against women, that they so often try to solve
problems with violence, personally and politically?
The most profound, courageous and eye opening presentation in that Stockholm
conference was made by Per Are Lökke, a child and youth psychologist from
Norway. He saw violence as a symptom both of the power structures towards women,
children and other men and of a self-subjugation system penetrating all male culture.
This power/powerlessness (makt/avmakt) structure he calls a social pathology of
masculinity.
Lökke described how our culture escapes the fact that violence is masculine i.e. that it
relates with gender and concerns all men. One of the basic characteristics of this male
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pathology is the inability of men to meet, to face woman as a living person in reality.
Our culture trains boys to be bold and responsible in working and public life but not
in close human relationships. They are given physical training in football and games
but they don’t learn to stand on their own feet in their own emotional life.
Male vulnerability stems from two sources: ordinary men feel threatened both by men
and women. Woman unveils him, makes him naked, small and dependent. Exactly this
vulnerability he wishes to compensate at any cost. Other men can erect higher
monuments than he and make him feel weak, impotent and worthless, which he wants
to compensate at all possible costs, too.
These same men invest everything in their life in order to erect their projects,
monuments for themselves and to reach impossible male ideals. There is always the
same dream behind, to build for oneself a monument in the endless competition against
other men, thus to make oneself immortal.
Lökke elaborated the problematic behind male violence very sharply. He finds the
absence of fathers in the life of boys and their inability to create close and functional
relations with their sons as the primary reasons for disturbances and problems in the
personal development of boys. There is not such a father tradition in our culture and
therefore men are like small kids in their emotional life, because there has not been any
father figure to teach them the ABC of emotional life.
The recipe of Lökke to change this is a fundamental transformation of male culture, to
change the education of boys from the beginning. But before that men have to change
fundamentally their own lives, to make a cultural revolution in their behaviour as
fathers. Thus the cultural revolution has to begin as much with fathers as with sons.
Along with these new trends in men research a movement among men is
emerging on the same lines in Norway, Sweden and Finland. This movement
and research among men is extremely important. It is the first serious attempt to
look into the very roots of violence in our culture. It is the very first sign for a
long time that something really new is sprouting within patriarchy.
Lökke also warns, however, of a risk implicit in focusing on violence as the most
problematic feature of male culture, because then one might lose the fact that this is
only one of many symptoms of the serious problematics of masculinity. His view of the
matter is that we are fairly helpless in our efforts to eliminate the basic factors and
causes of violence in our culture if we don’t succeed in getting men/fathers back to
their sons and to live hand-in-hand with them.
In any case, these new developments give much hope. If men would be supported and
trained to compensate their vulnerability with personal growth and emotional
maturation instead of violence and ridiculous monuments, it would make life much
easier and happier for all of us, men and women together! The change among men has
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to be done by themselves, it cannot be done by women from outside - as much as many
of us may have tried.
New Avenues for the Peace Movement?
We are now beginning to understand that peace is not only an issue of international
violence and use of force and cruelties in political conflicts. Weapons and military
systems are just symptoms and tools for violence, but certainly not a cause of it.
We have learned that violence is an issue of patriarchal culture as a whole at personal
as well as at international and structural levels. It is basically an issue of how boys and
men are brought up in this culture - and also how we women are brought up to be
faithful daughters and servants of the patriarchy.
These developments give much new hope for the peace movement, they are important
lessons to us. The peace movement also needs to see more clearly, go into the roots of
violence, develop comprehensive vision and act in parallel at many levels. We as peace
activists, need
- still to act in our traditional ways, revealing and acting against the manifest
symptoms of militarism, armaments and physical violence in international and
political conflicts, and doing that from the bases of deeper and more profound
analyses. But that is only a part of the strategy, since it hits only the tip of the
iceberg.
- at the same time to be active in alleviating structural violence and against
incitement to economic war, to increasing competition between the power
blocks, enterprises and people, which only leads to increasing rule of the strong
and the rich, and to growing disparities and injustice.
- to encourage and support all efforts to make thorough analyses and bold
conclusions about the causes of violence in our culture, the ways and means by
which patriarchal culture subjects boys and men to a discipline, which does not
let them grow mentally and emotionally and become balanced and selfconfident persons - the kind of persons who do not need to manifest their
masculinity with force, power and building ridiculous monuments for
themselves.
- to utilize the new findings and insights in this field and develop methods of
pedagogy and civic education for bringing up new men - new women, too - and
a new culture, the culture of peace, where use of force and violence is
considered to be primitive, uncivilized and shameful behavior.
As women and feminist peace activists we have much at stake, we can say that we have
“a vested interest” in this new approach. Therefore we should do all that we can diplomatically and discreetly - to support and speed up the research, awareness-raising
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and education to bring up new boys, men and fathers - and thus new kinds of loving
and well-balanced companions and partners for ourselves.
Our own home work as women is to make ourselves aware of the values and
characteristics of a woman’s role in patriarchy and liberate ourselves from that. Many
of us may need to reassess and revise her male ideal, the image of “the wonderful man”
in her own mind. And we should refuse in our own lives to be the dutiful and
“beautiful” daughters of the patriarchy, who admire and desire military and other
heroes and accept the role of the conspicuous consumer in the dominating market
hegemony.
These kind of new insights and research into our patriarchal culture and
conscientization among men and women are decisive steps towards peace. All this
gives a lot of inspiration and new hope, though there is a long journey ahead. But even
the longest journey begins with the first step and proceeds step by step. Let us build up
and broaden the road for that journey!
References:
Lökke, Per Are: Om kön, våld och faders frånvaro (About gender, violence and
absence of the fathers), a lecture in the Conference “Är våld manligt?”, Stockholm 15.
January 1997.
United Nations; The Nairobi Forward-Looking Strategies for the Advancement of
Women. The UN Department of Public Information, 1985, New York.
United Nations; Efforts to eradicate violence against women within the family and
society. E/CN.6/1988.6
United Nations; Violence against Women in the Family. UN Centre for Social
Development and Humanitarian Affairs, New York, 1989 (ST/CSDHA/2) Sales No.
E.89.IV.5.
United Nations; Platform for Action and the Beijing Declaration. Fourth World
Conference on Women, Beijing, China 4-15 September 1995. Department of Public
Information, United Nations, New York 1996. (Particularly Chapter Four: Strategic
Objectives and Actions: D. Violence against women; E. Women and armed conflict; L.
The girl-child.)