“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
Margaret Atwood
“Women’s Rights as Human Rights: Toward a Re-Vision of Human Rights,” by Charlotte Bunch (published in Human Rights Quarterly in 1990), is considered a classic text in the field of women’s human rights. In it, Bunch sets out her arguments about the importance of connecting women’s rights to human rights in theory and practice and what prevented recognition of women’s rights as human rights.
“A significant numbers of the world’s population are routinely subject to torture, starvation, terrorism, humilation, mutilation and even murder simply because they are female – writes Bunch. Crimes such as these against any group other than women would be recognized as a civil and political emergency as well as a gross violation of the victim’s humanity. Yet, despite a clear record of deaths and demonstrable abuse, women’s rights are not commonly classified as human rights”.
Although thirty years went by from the publication of Bunch’s text, nothing, or really little, has changed in regards to women’s rights and gender based violence across the world.
Sex discrimination kills women daily. When combined with race, class, and other forms of oppression, it constitutes a deadly denial of women’s rights to life and liberty. The most pervasive violation of females is violence against women in all its manifestations, from wife battery, incest, and rape, to dowry deaths, genital mutilation, and female sexual slavery.
The Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, also known as VDPA, it is an human rights declaration adopted at the World Conference on Human Rights on 25 June 1993 in Vienna. This declaration states that, “The human rights of women and of the girl-child are an inalienable, integral and indivisible part of universal human rights. The full and equal participation of women in political, civil, economic, social and cultural life, at the national, regional and international levels, and the eradication of all forms of discrimination on grounds of sex are priority objectives of the international community“.
Twenty-seven years later the rate of feminicide all over the world it is still increasing day by day, with a massive escalation in the last 11 months, due to the COVID pandemic and consequent lockdown, during which bilions of women have been forced at home with their abusive partners. According to a United Nations study, 58 percent of reported murders of women in 2017 were committed by a partner, former partner or family member. 137 femicides occur worldwide every day. A figure projected for the first two months of 2020 speaks of almost 8 thousand women killed.
In the United Kingdom, 14 women were murdered in March by men, nearly three times the average for the same period over the last decade, according to the UK Femicide Census and the NGO “Counting Dead Women”.
In Turkey, 18 women have been killed since the beginning of lockdown, the majority in their homes.
59 women were killed in the first half of 2020 in Italy and, if in 2019 they made up 35% of the total murders, this year the incidence stands at 45%.
Liberia recorded a 50% increase in gender-based violence in the first half of this year. Between January and June, there were more than 600 reported rape cases. The number for the whole of 2018 was 803 in the West African country. Nigeria also saw an increase of sexual violence during the curfews. Two cases in June, in which young women were raped and killed, shocked the country. In Kenya, local media reported almost 4,000 schoolgirls becoming pregnant when schools were closed during the lockdown. In most cases they had allegedly been raped by relatives or police officers. The UN’s MINUSCA mission in the Central African Republic reported another increase: 27% more instances of rape, and 69% more cases where women and children were hurt.
The risks of violence to women and girls that existed thirty years ago are still there, but the pace of societal and technological change means that new and evolving forms of abuse are continuously emerging, and it’s worrying the fact that governments are doing little or inaudibles steps to ensure that women and girls can live, thrive and succeed in a safe society. On the other hand many grassroots organizations, NGOs and women associations are filling up the gaps, supporting and protecting women from any kind of abuse.
We could go on, filling up pages with numbers and data related to gender based violence, highlighting once more the impunity of the perpetrators, the lack of legal frameworks that would ensure the respect and safeguard of all women’r rights, or the male perspective and approach to the matter that makes gender, and intersectionality, still a good reason to take someone’s life, freedom, body or soul.
Instead we are here to celebrate all the women that are working, on the ground, in different countries to ensure that a change it is really being made. We are here to remember all those women that said “enough is enough” and decided to raise from the shame, the stigma, the patriarchal society in which they were born, raised and beaten, to create a better future for themselves and other women and girls.
Wempower dedicates this issue to all the survivors and to all the women that shall never experience any form of violence in their lives, but instead thrive and succeed.
Buy your copy of “Women Rights are Human Rights” here.
