Reading up for potentially the biggest interview of my life - I pause to think of the cycle of sexual gender based violence and the way it affects so many essential parts of a woman's life. Beginning at the youngest of ages, SGBV can affect the safety of a child going to school, the stigma associated with her being a child of SGBV, of her mother being a victim of a rape, and of the consequential stigma also placed on a mother when she receives a test of positive on her HIV/AIDS prenatal care. From there forward, it raises havoc in even the most seemingly menial tasks: from access to education to access to water, the protection of women doing daily chores at a water well, or tending to land, going to the market. An enabling society of SGBV makes it difficult for women to access any position of power, to be considered as an influence in a community or in a decision making role, because she carries with her a stigma, enabled and unprosecuted by a society that has allowed for such violence to occur, and for the woman to continue being treated as a continually shunned and stigmatized victim. The lack of women in positions of power and decision making role makes it impossible to adequately assess and incorporate the needs and wants of women in a given population into social policies, and the enabling society is allowed to persist.
The simple act of making school a safe place for young girls to go will allow those girls to then grow up and become teachers who will teach in protected schools. This access to education will allow them to not only access different positions of power with the labour market but also be imbued with knowledge of HIV/AIDS and the risky sexual behavior associated with the spread of the disease. With this knowledge and education, this young woman can spread her know how to other young women, and make for herself a living that may or may not benefit other young women. The point is, she is given the opportunity to do so. With her education she can have the possibility to access a position of power, depending on her level of commitment (women accessing politics and decision making roles come across their own obstacles: in the form of male dominated political games, lack of training and financial support, a bad label/representation in the media, persisting gender and familial roles and the burden of the dual job, where a woman is both mother and worker where politics usually does not allow her to be both) and subsequently lobby to bring about change to sex laws, the definition of rape, access to sex education, healthcare and psycho social recovery for SGBV survivors. Her power can lead aid organizations in her community to begin seeing programmes through a gender lense, and attempting to mainstream gender perspectives into the projects. In communities coming out of conflicts, peacebuilding is an essential way to lay the foundations of gender integration and women's rights, sometimes looking into positive rights to ensure that not only are women free of discriminatory actions, but that they can also live in a society that allows them equality with their male counterparts.
SGBV is an essential if not intrinsic part of that equality. Women often times come to represent the purity, the sanctity and the preservation of a culture. An act of SGBV on a woman, especially during war time can come to mean the very destruction of the fabric of a family, a community and the representation of culture embodied in that woman. The shame, humiliation and consequent stigma of such an act indicates the social representation of the act itself. Protecting women against SGBV through actual physical security, incorporating projects and programs that identify gender perspectives and ensure women's rights are taking into consideration, involving women in politics and decision making roles, reinforcing law enforcement and judicial systems to adequately prosecute proponents of SGBV and providing care for the survivors are all ways to make certain that SGBV does not perpetrate itself in an 'enabling' society where an act is committed because there will be no consequence and because women continue to be seen as weaker, more vulnerable and potentially 'less than' their male counterparts.
I am personally quite opposed to the way women are viewed in many developing and eastern/southern nations. Women should have the right to stand as a human being first and foremost, with equal access to education, development, and equality, not as a keeper of the purity and preservation of her culture. This preservation is almost always defined as the purity of the woman herself, so any sexual act outside the one ordained under marriage, is seen as a seen and a dirty mark on what the culture hopes to represent. This high regard to women holds numerous pitfalls. First, it makes women easy targets in wartime, when the SGBV on a woman comes to signify an act towards an entire culture and its people. Secondly, it denies a woman the right to her body, to her sexuality and to her reproductive rights, rights hazily advocated for in CEDAW and at the Beijing Platform in 1995. Thirdly, it usually means that women will come to represent the culture as wives and mothers, denying her right to education and to employment in a job market. The perpetuation of this role for women continually means that although women may be said to be held to such high decree, socialization of that decree results in a woman being treated as unequal to the role of a man. Her duties are her own to perform so that may live up to her standard, and it is the men who will decree what these duties are.
This is a vicious cycle for women that makes them more susceptible to SGBV and therefore more likely to be ostracized from a community and shunned from her family based on such an act. If she is meant to be the holder of a culture's purity and she is unpure, a community will readily shun her and keep the women who have maintained their purity. In all circumstances under this view of a woman, she is at a loss in her rights, her agency and her vocation and becomes an easy target in war times, one only has to look to Darfur and the Congo to see how rape has been used as a weapon of war.
We have made huge strides in looking towards the protection of women against SGBV. Apart from the list I mentioned above, the UN has come up with various resolutions that seek to guarantee this protection. In October 2000, the Resolution 1325 on Women Peace and Security, sought to protect women facing SGBV and incorporate women into peacebuilding to prevent further SGBV enabling societies. Resolution 1820 in 2008 was groundbreaking in the fact that not only did it recognize rape as a weapon of war but declared it a threat to international peace and stability, the leading trigger for initiating humanitarian interventions. This meant that in places like the Congo, the widespread use of rape would have international legal backing on the grounds of passing a resolution allowing for military forces to enter the country. Recently, with the advent of Hilary Clinton as Secretary of State, we have seen another initiative to continuously advocate on behalf of women's rights. With this on the top of her agenda, the UN adopted resolution 1880 which builds on 1325 in that in marks the necessity not only for protection against SGBV but also training for security and peacekeeping forces on gender equality, the review of programs under a gender lens and the positioning of stronger monitoring and evaluation on such programs. In the same breath the Secretary General not only called for the creation of a lead organization that would head women's rights, a three year long advocacy program that finally yielded results, but also the creation of a league of male advocates on behalf of women's rights.
This is something I have been advocating for, for a long time, and yet, as evident as it might appear, so many organizations were not putting it into their projects and programs overseas. With men being the main perpetrators of SGBV and the predominant figures in decision making roles, it is intrinsic to include them in the battle for women's rights. To create societies that uphold women in equality, men need to be included to learn the value and returns on such activity. Recently mullahs in Afghanistan were being schooled on birth control and women's right to her reproductive self, and in peacebuilding, men have always been at the forefront of foundation programs that sought to incorporate women. This piece of the puzzle will also allow for a thorough discussion on the socialization of male violence and anger towards women. If we understand why this occurs in times of peace, perhaps we will be more adept at preventing it in times of conflict.
The biggest obstacles ahead in the battle for women's rights will definitely be the inclusion of women in decision making roles and politics and the protection and prevention of SGBV against women. However, with new international commitment and missing pieces of the struggle being brought into the discussion, this obstacle will hopefully diminish sooner over a shorter period of time.
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