Strengthening International Efforts to Protect Women from Violence
By Brian D. Lepard
Violence against women afflicts women of all nationalities, races, and social strata. While the global community has made some efforts to protect victims, now is the time for the United Nations (UN), Member States, and organs of civil society to take bold steps to aid women who are abused, to punish perpetrators, and to prevent violence in the first place.
Actors of all kinds must be motivated by a recognition that women and men are equal and equally invaluable members of one human family, and that an injury to women is an injury to humanity as a whole. As the Bahá’í International Community underscored in its 2020 statement, A Governance Befitting, “The human family is one. . . . [The] profound implications [of this truth] for our collective behavior must now give rise to a coordinated movement toward higher levels of social and political unity.”
The problem of violence against women is rampant. The World Health Organization estimates that on a global level about 30% of women have suffered physical or sexual violence by partners, or sexual violence by non-partners, sometime in their lives. Unfortunately, this wave of violence against women has intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic, leading the UN to call it the “Shadow Pandemic.”
Women experience the threat of violence in multiple forms. Violence is perpetrated against them by spouses or intimate partners, by trusted community leaders or friends, by human traffickers, by the government in state-run prisons, and in international and civil wars.
We can gain new insights into how to respond to this threat to women’s security from international human rights law. This important body of law includes the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). CEDAW, a treaty, makes the equal treatment of women and men a binding legal obligation for those states that ratify it. In 1992, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, which supervises implementation of CEDAW, declared that gender-based violence constitutes discrimination prohibited by the treaty. It further said that states parties must act with “due diligence” to prevent violations of the rights of women by private actors, such as husbands or intimate partners.
In 1993, the UN General Assembly adopted a Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women (“DEVAW”). The Declaration calls upon all states to exercise due diligence to prevent and punish acts of violence against women. Other advances have included the appointment of a Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls and the adoption of an optional protocol to CEDAW that allows individual women or groups of women to petition to hear their cases heard by the CEDAW Committee. Goal 5 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the UN in 2015 includes the target of eliminating “all forms of violence against all women and girls in the public and private spheres, including trafficking and sexual and other types of exploitation.”
Moreover, the international community has begun to address many of the specific forms of violence against women described above. For example, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), adopted in 1998, explicitly provides that rape and other forms of sexual violence can constitute a crime against humanity or a war crime under international law. And in 2000, the UN adopted the “Palermo” Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children.
The adoption of these standards has been a laudable achievement. What is critical now is to implement these standards at the national and local levels so that they positively affect the lives of women everywhere. A multi-pronged strategy is required, one guided by these standards as well as the principle of human oneness described above, a principle that also respects human diversity and gender differences.
According to this principle, all human beings—men and women alike—are socially and at the level of the human spirit members of one human family who ethically should strive to promote their unity, while also valuing their group and individual identities that make them so distinctive. This principle supports the empowerment of women and efforts on the part of women, men, and all states and organs of society to protect women from violence.
What particular steps do states need to take, guided by this principle? First, all UN Member States should adopt, if they have not already, laws making domestic violence a crime, requiring the detention of suspected perpetrators to protect victimized women, expanding the availability of restraining orders, and allowing the prosecution of “date rape,” stalking, and nonconsensual sharing of intimate images. Laws should prohibit female genital mutilation, marital rape, forced marriage, and child marriage—practices that constitute or are conducive to violence against women and violate their rights. And legislation should make trafficking in women a crime with severe penalties, in conformity with international treaties like the Palermo Protocol. In this connection, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime has adopted a Model Law Against Trafficking in Persons to which states can refer.
All these laws must be vigorously enforced by local police and judges. This requires that they be educated about the problem of violence against women and relevant laws they are obligated to uphold. Most importantly, they must be trained to be sensitive to the emotional plight of the victims, rather than treat them with suspicion. In this connection, some countries have established police stations staffed exclusively by women with specialized training in assisting female victims of violence.
Procedural barriers to prosecutions must also be eliminated. These include, for example, archaic and misogynistic rules requiring victims of rape to be subjected to inquiries into their sexual history or to prove that they tried to fight off the perpetrator.
The global community must also vigorously prosecute crimes against women in wartime, including those that rise to the level of crimes against humanity. The ICC has a special role to play in this regard. And women must be empowered to bring cases not only before national courts, but if they fail to find satisfaction there, before international bodies. The Optional Protocol to CEDAW establishing an individual complaint procedure is a step in the right direction, but the CEDAW Committee cannot issue binding judgments. In addition, therefore, the UN should consider the establishment of a full-fledged international court, modeled on regional courts like the European Court of Human Rights, to provide recourse to female victims of violence. This could be accomplished in the first instance through an additional protocol to CEDAW.
A critically important step involves prevention of violence against women through education. Men and boys must be educated about women’s rights and the legal prohibitions in national and international law of violence against women. Women and girls must also be educated about their rights, so that they know that they do not have to tolerate abuse and are legally entitled to escape it and see justice done to their oppressors.
In addition, educational initiatives must include moral education of all citizens, but especially children, in the equal dignity of men and women, and in the right of every person, including women, to be free from physical, psychological, or verbal abuse. Education must help men and boys to see marriage as an equal partnership, and understand that doctrines that view women as the servants of men are unjust and must be rejected. All these efforts will reinforce each other, resulting, in the words of the Bahá’í International Community, “in a tipping point at which the society will no longer tolerate the oppression of its girls and women.”
Brian D. Lepard is the Harold W. Conroy Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Nebraska College of Law. He has published numerous books and articles on international human rights law, and is writing a book on using international law to protect women from violence.