16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence

Statement by Israeli Women's Organizations

We women's organizations from a broad spectrum of political views demand an end to the bombing and other tools of death, and call for the immediate start of deliberations to talk peace and not make war. The dance of death and destruction must come to an end. We demand that war no longer be an option, nor violence a strategy,  nor killing an alternative. The society we want is one in which every individual can lead a life of security - personal, economic, and social.

Zoya Rouhana writes from Beirut:

A Message for World AIDS Day 2008

The criminal prosecution of people with HIV is accelerating insidiously around the world. This article charts developments since Alice Welbourn's openDemocracy report on this ‘war on women' for International Women's Day 2008.

It's a real challenge, this AIDS business: you can't take your eye off the ball for one minute and you are in constant danger of being hit by a bludger. Two to three years ago, we thought we'd won the battle over whether we people with HIV could take our drugs responsibly or not - we thought that particular prejudice had receded. At last, life-saving treatment started to be rolled out across Africa and beyond, creating more people like me - I have now been healthy, living and working with HIV for 20 years, eight of them on anti-retroviral drugs. Hospitals, formerly over-flowing with the sick and dying have emptied. If we are given consistent access to drugs in good time, we now have long life-expectancy. Thanks to this Lazarus effect, whole economies and work-forces - individual lives and families - have been able to get going again. Nonetheless, only around 3 million out of the 9 million of us who need these drugs now are currently able to get them. We are still a long way from the ‘Universal Access by 2010' commitments endorsed again this week by International Development Minister, Ivan Lewis. So that battle isn't over yet: but we have hope

Then a year or two ago, we realised the new battle ground was to ensure that treatment access was being properly rolled out to women, not just for a few months while we were pregnant and gave birth to our children, but for all our lives and whether we are mothers or not. WHO and UNAIDS reports cryptically state that more ‘women' than ‘men' are accessing anti-retroviral drugs. This is being economical with the truth. In reality, what swells the first figure is not women in their own right, but ‘women-who-are-being-used-as-vessels-to-give-drugs-to-unborn-children'. Pregnant women are targeted for ‘voluntary and confidential' testing - translated by health ministries and their staff around the world into mandatory and public testing. They are given drugs until the child is born, so that a box can be ticked to fulfil US government ‘Pepfar' funding commitments to ‘save the unborn child'. Then mother and child are released from health centre ‘care' - only to find that their child succumbs to HIV through breastfeeding because they can't afford an alternative, aren't alert to the need for one, or can't hide an alternative feeding process from their curious neighbours. To rub salt in our wounds, as my previous article for openDemocracy explained, women with HIV are now being criminalised for transmitting HIV to our children, without any regard for the chronic social, economic and medical complexities of this virus.

Alice Welbourn is an international activist and campaigner on women's rights and HIV/Aids, and former international chair of the International Community of Women Living with HIV/AIDS (ICW)During the last year, the entire global AIDS community has been brought to the chilling realisation that whilst these and many other important battles were - and still are - being fought, a major war on all of us with HIV has quietly been breaking out worldwide. This war is called criminalisation and its perpetrators are governments we naively looked to to protect our rights.

Personally I don't like warfare. I even find competitive games hard work. I am someone who believes strongly in the power of positive language to create energy and vision and new ways of seeing the world and acting in it. I far prefer to seek mediation and reconciliation, and not to use the language and metaphors of aggression and violence so over-subscribed to by the world's powers-that-be. But in this business of AIDS I often despair of finding the positive language that we need to convey the enormity and urgency of what is going on here, which is why I have had recourse to this militant language. It terrifies me to see how these punitive new measures are being rolled out with such crushing alacrity, unravelling years of quiet, careful, committed and compassionate work.

Prominent human rights lawyer, Baroness Helena Kennedy QC, speaking at the Sophia Forum inaugural lecture in London last week, compared this criminalisation of people with HIV to that other imposition of punitive and restrictive legislation, which has curbed all our human rights, in response to terrorism over the last few years. She described how hysteria and fear of the ‘other' has encouraged governments to ‘reach for the law' in a vain attempt to ‘control' the spread of HIV, along similar lines to their 'war on terror'. She also highlighted how prosecutions for HIV transmission in the UK have unevenly targeted men who were refugees or asylum seekers. To take her analogy further, and to quote from her book, Just Law, ‘the flames of public fear are fanned by government rhetoric and behaviour'.

Will we never learn from history that the law is a blunt instrument in relation to public health concerns? The experience of American prohibition springs to mind, as does the case of Typhoid Mary. Baroness Kennedy chose to recall the response to the arrival of ‘Grandgor's distemper' in Edinburgh in 1497. She described how King James decreed that all those with this new condition, probably syphilis, must either be banished to an off-shore island or branded with an iron on the cheek to let all know of their condition. Kennedy continued, quoting Justice Michael Kirby of Australia: ‘Panic. Alarm. Banishment. Cruelty. Public stigmatisation. Law. These are the melancholy companions of disease and epidemics. The question .... is whether, in the five hundred years since King James IV issued his Proclamation against Grandgor we have advanced in our appreciation of the limits and opportunities of law in the face of a public health crisis'.

The answer is, tragically, no: this very week we learn that parliamentarians in Indonesian Papua are planning a new bye-law to insert micro-chips into people with HIV who are sexually active. Next month Uganda, once the beacon of good practice in relation to a compassionate AIDS response - and now a major recipient of US government funding - plans to introduce legislation making couple-disclosure compulsory, despite three women being killed by their husbands this year alone because of their HIV status. ‘Wilful transmission' will henceforth be punishable by death. These are just the latest in a long line of moves around the world to criminalise, isolate and alienate all of us with HIV in ways which are unjust, unworkable - and terrifying.

To complicate matters, various women's rights groups around the world - including some well-intentioned positive women - have promoted these punitive laws, imagining that they would curb the spread of HIV from men to their multiple female sexual partners who are fearful of negotiating condom use.

Too late, several women activists have now realised that these laws are dangerous for them also, who are the first to be tested - in ante-natal clinics - and who often therefore bear the brunt of the shock and blame. Such laws are generated by powerful patriarchal hegemonies like our own in Britain, where male establishment heterosexuality and women's subordination are institutionalised. Thus it is women - and others who are least able to defend themselves, including, gay men, asylum seekers, injecting drug users, migrant workers and people in prison - who are most likely to be targeted by the introduction and use of such legislation. In truth, there are very few women - or men - in the world who are really hell-bent on spreading this virus. It is fear of rejection that smothers disclosure. Yet these laws, like the virus itself, take no heed of the social, economic or other circumstances of those on whom they are unleashed. Criminalisation only serves to exacerbate fear - in all of us, positive, negative or not knowing our status.

This year we have also learnt much about the effectiveness of care, treatment and respect for people with HIV. Recent medical studies have confirmed that people with HIV who are given love and support are more likely to take their drugs regularly, cope with side-effects and maintain the high level of adherence needed to enable the drugs to work. People whose drugs are working well and who have an ‘undetectable viral load' and no other sexually transmitted infection can have unprotected sex with someone else with negligible chance of transmitting HIV to them. Moreover, pregnant women with HIV, with an undetectable viral load, can give normal birth to a child with 99.9% chance of the child being HIV-free.

This World AIDS Day, on the 60th anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, can we send out a concerted message to parliamentarians worldwide, calling on them, as Helena Kennedy did so powerfully, to put the human rights of all, including people with HIV, first in whatever they do to curb the spread of this pernicious virus? Punitive laws should be consigned to the dustbin of history. Parliamentarians, law enforcers, health workers, the media - and we the public at large - should be learning about the power of compassion in healing both bodies and minds. We must between us keep up the pressure to roll out universal treatment, and recognise with humility how HIV may affect each and every one of us. One day these laws may terrorise your family too - I hope they never do.

A photo-essay by Nick Eastlake

The wind whistles, dogs howl. This might all be in your head but when you’re heading out on a windswept autumn evening it does not take much to get you scared. Especially if you see a shadow in the opposite entrance of the park you need to cross to get to your tube station. Still, lurking, male.

Spot the Danger

To combat that fear of dark streets and some of the dangers they contain a legion of women heeds the call of the London Feminist Network (LFN) and comes out one late November night in London’s West End for the 5th incarnation of the Reclaim the Night march. The event’s history goes back to 1977 when the Yorkshire Ripper was terrorising the north of England and the police were advising that, to avoid attack, women should stay inside after dark.

What do we want? – Safe streets! When do we want them? – Now!

Such a curfew was contested then and is contested now. Many of the protestors feel that an unholy alliance of inconsiderate policing, laissez-faire laws, and the media from lad’s mags to women’s glossies conspires to turn them into sexual objects only asking to be hunted down on a Saturday night such as this. They will have none of that.

Why we are marching

Tourists with digital cameras take snaps of the marchers with their hundreds of placards reading ‘End Violence Against Women’. Locals use their mobile phones. Some lager lads think it is a carnival, put on their empty takeaway boxes as silly hats, and hoot and holler. The manager of a famous lap dancing venue en route parks his beamer on the other side of the road and keeps a close eye on this precious money-spinner as the women march by. He needn’t have worried. The police are en garde.

Hey hey – Ho ho Sexual violence got to go

Many organizations involved in managing the fallout from assorted forms of male sexual aggression join the rally at Friend’s House following the march. Aravinda Kosaraju from the Coalition for the Removal of Pimping (CROP) speaks out against sophisticated networks grooming girls as young as 11 and calls for a change of law similar to that recently introduced in Norway. Jane Gregory from Bradford Rape Crisis Centre looks across the border to Scotland where these important refuges for women are annually corefunded with £50k each. The decline of funding is a constant theme, not least in Imkaan’s Gita Patel’s moving fairy tale that asks the audience to make a Happy End possible by signing a petition on their website. There are many others organizations who send a speaker or set up information stands to rally support for the women in their care.

See you in the frontline

A standing ovation is reserved for Finn Mackay, the LFN’s founder. In her speech she truly rallies the audience against our society’s sexualization of the young, objectification of women in magazines, ads and TV shows, all of which combine into one big brainwash: according to her, women currently spend more than £1 billion every year on plastic surgery and more teens would like to become glamour girls than doctors. She notes that an interest in pole dancing would at least get them into P.E. In the past, she reminds her audience, women had to fight for everything, be it the right to vote or equal pay: she promises to keep on fighting. At stake is the mindset of both men and women.

Zorro will steal your heart

One young marcher I talk to is not comfortable with the policing of the march. ‘How are women in charge of the street chaperoned like this?’ Of course, the statistics are shocking: each day there are more than 100 rapes, the same amount of attempted rapes, and nearly 1,000 sexual assaults. Yet the conviction rate is only 5.3%. (British Crime Survey, 2001). But, she suggests, women shouldn’t become counted victims in the first place. Women have to learn to defend themselves and each other.

I feel more threatened by police than men

Martial arts might be a better bet than pole dancing. To quote Finn Mackay one more time: ‘We know it’s always safer to resist.’ For a karate black belt, even that lurking figure in the park on the way home seems less of a threat. On close inspection, this time, it is made of metal and advertises a Trim Trail. ‘Exercise is good for your general health…’ … But it might have been different.

Make my day

More pics on flickr or join the march.

My lightening visit to the Wilton Park conference on "Women Targeted by Armed Conflict: What Role for Military Peacekeepers?" last Wednesday was a real eye-opener. Since this trip was sandwiched between International Peacekeeping Day on Thursday and Tuesday's release of a new report by Save the Children UK showing that girls and boys in conflict-affected countries such as Sudan, the Ivory Coast and Haiti fail to report sexual exploitation and abuse by some humanitarian aid workers and UN peacekeeping troops through fear, you might expect this revelation to contain further information about abusive peacekeepers. Actually, the eye-opener was about the nature of war today.

The hall and flanking sitting rooms were crammed with high-level military commanders, tacticians and academics with experience of peacekeeping operations; policy-makers from major troop contributing countries (TCCs) and those affected by armed conflict; police commanders, representatives from regional security organisations, the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) and other high level UN representation. They were all there to address the uncomfortable fact that today, as Patrick Commaert, a Major General recently retired from the Netherlands Armed Forces, put it: "It has probably become more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in armed conflicts."

This is because of the changing nature of warfare, as a result of which civilians are increasingly not just random, incidental victims of conflict - collateral damage - but targets of it. Captive male combatants are also subjected to sexual torture and terror, but women and girls are the majority of civilians targeted for this particular form of atrocity, on a frightful scale: three out of four women in parts of the Eastern Kivus in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC); 90% of all females above the age of three in parts of Liberia; up to 50% of women and girls in Sierra Leone. This sexual violence against women is not confined to rape. International law now encompasses within this definition forced prostitution; sexual slavery; forced impregnation; forced maternity; forced termination of pregnancy; enforced sterilization; indecent assault; trafficking; inappropriate medical examinations and strip searches. These acts amount to a method of warfare when they are used systematically to torture, injure, extract information, degrade, threaten, intimidate or punish in relation to an armed conflict.

For millennia, sexual violence and rape have been attributed to the opportunistic behaviour of renegade combatants preying on female civilians during the fog of war. After the experiences of the Second World War, the 1949 Geneva Conventions included explicit reference to rape, calling for women to be "especially protected against any attack on their honour, in particular against rape, enforced prostitution, or any form of indecent assault." It is interesting to see that this talk of "honour" has been subsequently interpreted by judicial bodies as an attack against the psychological and physical integrity of the victim as an individual, rather than as a community symbol - since it is precisely social, political and religious norms identifying women and girls as the property of men that has turned them into such potent tools of war, when violence against women constitutes a direct attack on the values or "honour" of the enemy community.

But now there is gathering evidence of commanders 'turning a blind eye' towards mass actions, as well as explicit command leading to sexual violence and humiliation. It was the sheer scale and magnitude of sexual violence in the Balkans and Rwanda that made this impossible for the world to ignore. Today, this is a recognised characteristic of recent conflicts on the Security Council's agenda in Bosnia, Rwanda, Sudan, Haiti, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, Somalia, Chad - the list continues. There are of course problems with gathering evidence. In particular in the case of women who have been raped, atrocities go unreported because the community's reaction is often to stigmatise the victim rather than prosecute the perpetrator. Only 2% of the perpetrators of reported cases of rape in the DRC province of South Kivu were taken to court. Even if a perpetrator was arrested, he will be released when an agreement is reached outside court with the family of the victim. Meanwhile, a study conducted there suggested that 45% of raped women were subsequently rejected by their husbands.

There is a new understanding among peacekeepers as well of the spiral of descent that can grip these conflict zones. Peacekeepers make a key distinction between 'widespread and systematic' sexual violence and that which is 'widespread and opportunistic'. The former is a crime against humanity - an organised campaign directed against the civilian population contrary to international law. The conference press briefing contained a thought-provoking definition: this is 'rape as a sexual manifestation of aggression, rather than an aggressive manifestation of sexuality.' 'Widespread and opportunistic' sexual violence however describes something very different. When rape is perpetrated on a massive scale with apparent impunity by armed actors, state and non-state alike, ordinary citizens may feel they too can get away with it, and they do. Rape becomes socially normalised and generalised.

This happens in traumatised post-conflict societies, where demobilised militias flood back into communities awash with small arms and light weapons, "without the requisite psychological debrief for reintegration into civilian life and standards." Peacekeepers find that this sort of social breakdown makes a mockery of efforts to reassert the rule of law, and profoundly undermines community recovery and the long-term sustainability of any peace efforts. It also poses massive tactical challenges to peacekeepers because of the vast range of contexts in which it occurs, in homes, streets, fields or woods.

The current climate of impunity in most post conflict contexts allows the many forms of gender-based violence, including sexual violence, to flourish. In a climate of impunity, sexual violence can be safely committed without perpetrators risking arrest, prosecution or punishment. When this happens, there is a risk that sexual violence will degenerate into a widespread and systematic crime. Often the political will to end the vicious cycle of impunity does not exist. In the DRC, for example, all armed groups involved in the conflict have perpetrated sexual violence against women and girls, and Government security forces have become the largest violator of human rights. It is in such degenerated contexts as those in the DRC, Liberia and Haiti, that a minority of UN personnel and other international actors have also been implicated in perpetrating sexual violence. In Wilton Park, military peacekeepers were gathered to discuss not just the implied leadership problem behind infringements by their own personnel and the growing call for a revival of a dedicated unit to deal with it - but the much wider challenge of what to do about this new form of conflict. It is a carnage that the military has been slow simply to see - and to acknowledge as the major security issue that it is.

Women targeted by armed conflict

Read the four reports from the conference

The changing face of war

Protecting women and girls in conflict

Sexual Violence not just a gender issue

Pray the devil back to hell

Stop rape now: UN action against sexual violence in conflict

Also on openDemocracy: Anne-Marie Goetz, "War and sexual violence: an issue of security" plus an interview with John Holmes, UN Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs