Vienna +10: Speak Out
E-Consultation Survey Results

Violence Against Women: Does linking the concept of human rights to violence against women create any problems/dilemmas?

Conflicts

• Those who benefit
• Perpetrators looking for excuses
• Right wing governments
• Non state actors accountability
• Insensitive policy makers
• Dual Systems and Double Standards
• Statutory and collective rights
• Traditional position of in society
• Controversial Rights
• fetal rights' that curtail women's rights prohibiting abortions for rape survivors
• Female genital mutilation and the right to freedom of religion and respect for cultures and minorities

Complaints

• Human Rights as just for men, for political and economic rights only
• Human Rights is a hegemonic western concept
• An Organization is blamed for intervention and 'destruction' of family
• Mainstream human rights organizations with no clear feminist perspective leads to victimization of women
  Risks
• Resistance even by some women's organizations have to using a human rights model
• Too many people and organizations still see human rights approaches as not having "on the ground' or immediate application
• Any one who is intimidated or threatened by the feminist struggle will use any thing to criticize it, usually irrationally.
• linking the two can be counter-productive because there is a great resistance to HR concepts and agitation, both in the west and elsewhere
• the linkage is problematic amongst communities which are yet to understand that women have rights too.
• especially when linked to culture, tradition and religious fundamentalism

Limitations

• an overly narrow framework, ignores social complexities
• Alienates as "women only"
• The concept is excellent in theory but it does not reach women in poor, rural areas, and the non-literate with no options
• If HR are treated only as a legal set of concepts, then problems can arise.
• The mainstream human rights community is not familiar with issues of VAW and Gender Based violence
• a persistent perception of the women's human rights agenda as equivalent to the struggle against VAW. This can impede progress on a wider vision of indivisible women's human rights including economic and political rights

NO's

• it's an essential framework, alternative to fundamentalist and feminist essentialists ideas about women
• a somewhat better approach to take than advocating labor rights
• No, because one uses whatever tools available (Audre Lorde)