By Allyn Gaestel
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| Woman holds a placard saying ‘We don’t want to be raped anymore. Stop the violence’ during a demonstration organized by an ActionAid women’s group, in 2008 in Goma, DRC. (Photo credit: Jenny Matthews/ActionAid) |
ActionAid’s “Destined to Fail? How Violence Against Women Undermines Development” describes five key development issues that cannot be fully addressed without considering the impact of violence against women. Universal access to primary education is the second Millennium Development Goal (MDG), and the third MDG is the promotion of gender equality with an emphasis on education. ActionAid’s report explains that part of the difficulty in achieving these goals is a misunderstanding of the root causes of girls’ absences. Many girls face violent attacks on the way to school and even inside the school structure through administrators’ and teachers’ abuse of power and violence. To adequately meet the educational development goals, the report argues, violence against women must be addressed.
Maternal health development stagnates when women are subjected to violence in order to control their reproductive choices. Women and girls are also prone to attack when communities promote infanticide of female children out of cultural and social pressure to produce boys. Violence is also worsening the HIV/AIDS epidemic. When women face sexual assault they are unable to make their own decisions concerning their sexuality and are unable to assert their need for safe sex practices. The HIV epidemic is becoming an increasingly female problem and to stem the spread of the virus, women’s vulnerabilities must be addressed.
Violence against women is currently a widespread component of conflict. The report cites the misinterpretation of violence against women as a phenomenon linked to conflict, rather than an intrinsic war tactic, as blocking comprehensive peace building. Finally, good governance is impossible to achieve without representation from all sectors of society, including both men and women. Women’s issues are overlooked by many governments, in part because women are not in decision-making positions. But it can be difficult for women to enter power roles as women’s rights advocates are increasingly under attack. The clear links between gender-based violence and development hindrance, elucidated in the report, emphasize the need for a development agenda centered on an awareness of women’s repression and the violence women face.
ActionAid already strives to unite women’s freedom from violence with development progress in their projects. Their violence against women programs in Burundi, Sierra Leone, and Democratic Republic of Congo, which concluded in 2009, included the promotion of women’s education, reproductive health education and access, advocacy and lobbying. ActionAid’s second report “Her Stories” included testimonies from survivors of sexual violence about their experiences of empowerment and moving beyond their traumatic experiences. Sarah Harrison described the program to MediaGlobal by e-mail. “From a broad perspective, the VAW project greatly contributed (and had the greatest impact) on individual VAW survivors self-confidence and self-esteem, without which women and girls become introverted, isolated and marginalized, and hence their voices and opinions would not have been heard at the community, district or national level.” Survivors of sexual violence were not treated in a vacuum, but were integrated into the greater development agenda.
The “Destined to Fail?” report suggested that the UK government make violence against women a key feature of its international development agenda. The report was well received on International Women’s Day, March 8, when the UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced that Barronness Kinnock will fill a new role as the government’s key representative on sexual violence. Kinnock will work with several government sectors including the Department for International Development, the Foreign and Commonwealth office and the ministry of defense to ensure that violence against women is taken into account in their policy decisions. ActionAid UK’s women’s rights advocacy officer Sharon Smee described to MediaGlobal by email, “This is the first time such a dedicated post has existed in the UK and the new post should push the issue of violence against women further up the UK’s foreign policy agenda.”
The United States already has its own International Violence Against Women Act, which makes violence against women a foreign policy and development priority. With ActionAid’s two new reports, evidence continues to mount for the links between women’s freedom from violence and progress toward broad-ranging development goals.
