Violence Against Women

Kavita Ramdas, serving India, Nepal and Sri Lanka as the Ford Foundation’s New Delhi Representative, addresses the audience at the National Press Club during an ICRW event marking International Women’s Day that explored the causes and solutions to tackling the global epidemic of violence against young women and girls. Ramdas discusses the response to the brutal gang rape and subsequent death of Nirbhaya, a 23-year-old university student, in Delhi last December. Importantly, she also proposes ways to end violence against women in her country and beyond - which Ramdas says is the world’s greatest public health threat. 

Watch the video here>>

Tanzanian women who experience violence face an array of barriers when they seek help, and as a result, few women solicit or receive appropriate support, according to a new International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) report.

The report, “Help-Seeking Pathways and Barriers for Survivors of Gender-based Violence in Tanzania,” is based on a qualitative study in the Dar es Salaam, Iringa and Mbeya regions of the country. Researchers aimed to document community perceptions and attitudes about violence against women, identify available services for survivors as well as gaps in resources, and provide recommendations for improving existing services.

The study will inform the design of a new initiative by the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which strives to advance the availability and quality of services for survivors in Tanzania, improve the national response to violence and enhance research evidence related to gender-base violence, among other goals.

Violence against women is widespread in Tanzania, with 44 percent of women reporting in the most recent Demographic Health Survey that they’ve experienced physical or sexual violence from an intimate partner in their lifetime. Support services, meanwhile, are inadequate.

For the study, ICRW partnered with a team from the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Dar es Salaam to conduct interviews with service providers, male and female community members and others. Jennifer McCleary-Sills, a social and behavioral scientist, and Sophie Namy, a gender and development specialist, led the research for ICRW.

Based on the interviews, researchers found that many types of gender-based violence – such as forced sex or physical violence in a relationship – were perceived as socially acceptable. In terms of physical abuse, many women said that they came to expect and even accept such violence because that is the norm in their community.

Women who experience violence seldom report it to anyone, including the police or medical personnel, the study found. If women do seek help, they often face an extremely slow, cumbersome process that neither prioritizes survivors’ needs nor responds to violence as an emergency situation. What’s more, researchers found that adequate support and justice are often blocked by a host of socio-cultural and structural barriers. For instance, many women fear being blamed for reporting a rape or are hesitant to access the justice system if her perpetrator has the means to possibly pay off police or a government official.

Gaps in services for survivors of violence were found across the various regions in the study. However, researchers discovered that obstacles for those seeking help and to access to care were particularly prevalent in rural locations and communities outside of Dar es Salaam, the capital.

The study offers a comprehensive set of recommendations to improve how the government and all sectors respond to gender-based violence in general and survivors’ needs in particular. If implemented effectively, researchers say their recommendations have the potential to further strengthen Tanzania’s efforts to prevent and eliminate violence against women.

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Earlier this month – just before International Women’s Day – the U.S. Congress reauthorized the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). This in itself was a triumph. However, there was another victory won that warrants special attention: the legislation includes new, groundbreaking protections for young women and girls affected by child marriage.

This is a critical step in upholding the rights of adolescent girls around the world, and in shielding them from the harmful practice of  child marriage, which often has devastating consequences for girls, their families and their communities.

Under the leadership of Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL) and Representatives Betty McCollum (D-MN) and Congressman Aaron Schock (R-IL), who have consistently pushed for American leadership on this issue, provisions requiring the U.S. Secretary of State to author a national strategy to end child marriage were inserted to the VAWA reauthorization. ICRW and its partners in the Girls Not Brides USA coalition have advocated for the creation of such a strategy for years, and welcome the news that this important strategy will become a foreign policy reality for the United States.

If present trends continue, 142 million girls will marry over the next decade. That’s 38,000 girls married every day for the next 10 years. The costs of child marriage are high, not only for the girls themselves, but also for communities and societies as a whole. Because their bodies are not fully developed, child brides are at a very high risk of facing complications in pregnancy and childbirth – childbirth is the leading cause of death for girls ages 15-19. Young brides are more likely to experience gender-based violence, to drop out of school and to contract sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV.

These staggering statistics underscore the urgency of US action to end this debilitating practice. The provisions in the VAWA reauthorization are both a welcome and a necessary step forward in the quest to ensure that this is done.

Preventing – and ultimately eliminating – violence against young women and girls worldwide requires a layered approach that simultaneously tackles everything from the root causes of violence to how it intersects with health complications such as maternal mortality, an International Center for Research on Women’s (ICRW) panel said on March 7.

The diverse group came together for ICRW’s first Passports to Progress event in honor of ICRW’s new Turning Point campaign, which aims to change the course adolescent girls’ lives globally. Some 300 gathered at Washington, D.C.’s National Press Club on the eve of International Women’s Day to take part in the wide-ranging discussion.

Moderated by MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, panelists were Michael Elliott, president and chief executive officer of One; Christy Turlington Burns, founder of Every Mother Counts; Stella Mukasa, director of ICRW research and programs on gender-based violence; and Ravi Verma, who directs ICRW’s Asia Regional Office in New Delhi, India. Kavita Ramdas, the Ford Foundation’s Delhi representative, shared her perspective in a pre-recorded video.

The gathering took place just days after 15-year-old Pakistani girls' education activist Malala Yousafzai - who survived a shooting by the Taliban - was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Then, the day after Passports to Progress, the U.S. State Department posthumously honored with its Women of Courage Award the young woman who was fatally raped last December in Delhi. The 23-year-old has become known as Nirbhaya, which means "fearless" in Hindi.

These and other recent incidents of violence that captured the global spotlight helped to frame the March 7 conversation. Verma stressed that the Delhi rape represents a common occurrence in India’s capital and emphasized the need to address not only such public reflections of violence against young women, but also those that play out quietly, such as child marriage. “This is a manifestation of violence that happens in terms of restricting [girls’] choices and denying their rights,” Verma said about the practice of early marriage.

Turlington-Burns agreed, stating that girls ages 15 to 19 are most at risk of dying from complications during childbirth. “Girls, because they’re not fully developed and they’re malnourished, are in an incredibly vulnerable position when they’re put in the position of being married and impregnated prematurely,” she said. “It’s an incredibly cruel way for them to be in the world.”

HIV also is “the leading killer” of young women of reproductive age in developing countries, Elliott said. Many face numerous obstacles, including violence, to accessing treatment and prevention services. “The nexus, the connections between HIV infections and violence against women are deep, significant and impenetrable,” he said. “Sexual violence and HIV infection reinforce each other.”

Panelists said that successfully preventing gender-based violence requires a multifaceted approach that targets the “cross-cutting” nature of violence – or rather, the way in which it intersects with other facets of women’s lives, such as their health, their livelihood and their relationships. Working with men’s organizations is critical. Evaluating whether prevention efforts are effective and replicable needs to be a priority. And, panelists said, creating national policies that protect and support women and that hold perpetrators accountable are key.

Mukasa suggested that the “next frontier” on this issue also requires beginning to treat women’s economic empowerment programs worldwide “as a strategy for protecting women against violence.” “We also recognize that women’s political influence and participation in political processes is very empowering,” Mukasa said.

However, it is essential that every type of violence-prevention program addresses the root causes of gender-based violence. Experts said the origins of violence start early, with how girls and boys are socialized at home and in school.

“How you value the other gender," Mukasa said, "begins there.”

The Indian state of Haryana, a short drive from the capital New Delhi, is known for its social conservatism, a declining female population due to sex selection, and more recently, for a number of brutal rapes reported by the national media.

As I would soon learn, life in rural India is full of contrasts and contradictions. The first family I met wanted to tell me about a local unmarried heroine who at 25 took home a gold medal after winning an international wrestling competition.

“If she’d gotten married, then her concentration would have been on the household and her husband, but she didn’t, and now she’s doing really well,” Susheela, a 37-year-old mother of four daughters, told me.

Life is hard for Susheela but she still smiles a lot. She even smiles when the conversation finally turns to more serious matters: what it was like for her to be married as an illiterate child and move in with a strange family, in a strange village, miles from home.

 “At 14, what had I seen? I never even went to school – parents didn’t send girls to school back then. I came here and my in-laws said ‘work in the fields,’ so I worked in the fields. Because I suffered, I didn’t want them to do the same. I thought it would be better if at least my daughters studied,” Susheela says.

Despite this recognition, – marrying their own teenage daughters off as soon as possible remains their priority due to deeply rooted cultural norms.

The International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) is currently evaluating an innovative government program that used cash incentives to encourage parents like Susheela to delay marrying their daughters until they turn 18 – with the added hope that attitudes about a girl’s inherent value would improve. One of Susheela’s daughters, 17-year-old Kirin, is among the first girls to take part in the effort, called Apni Beti Apna Dhan (ABAD) – “Our Daughter, Our Wealth.” ICRW’s findings will be released in late 2013. 

For now, Kirin and her older sister, Heena, 19, remain unmarried, and later this year, they will have both completed secondary school. Once Kirin gets her payment (worth $350-$500) the two girls will be immediately married in a joint wedding.

The girls have ambitions to continue on to college and start a career as teachers before settling down. Yet they seemed unsure if they would be able to lead a life outside of the home, despite their parents’ desire for them to study further.

“If our parents-in-law say we can’t continue our studies or get jobs, then we’ll have to listen to them and our dreams will only stay a dream,” Heena says.

Kirin, adds “I become hopeless and my heart breaks at the thought of not going to college. Boys have all the permission, they can go, but not girls, parents are scared. We want to go to Bhiwani town to study full time. But we can’t because of ‘the situation.’”

“The situation” refers to a spate of horrific rapes in the past several months in Haryana. In one of the most severe cases, eight men raped a 16-year-old girl. The powerful Khap panchayats which govern social affairs in Haryana, proposed a solution: lower the legal age of marriage for girls. Although they do not have the authority to do so, girls fear they will incur an additional cost for this escalation in violence against them.

“It is always the girl who is blamed. One does the bad deed, and the other always pays the price,” Heena says.

There is still a long road ahead to gender equity in rural India. But the fact that Heena and Kirin will both finish secondary school, and are still living at home, signals that a generational shift has occurred. At the very least, the quality of these educated sisters’ lives will undoubtedly far exceed that of their mother. Even if it’s unlikely they’ll ever become world class wrestlers.

Jennifer Abrahamson is ICRW’s Senior Director of Strategic Communications. A version of this story appears on the ONE Campaign web site. Not Her Mother's Daughter was Jennifer's last story about adolescent girls in India.

To learn more about how ICRW is working to “change the course for adolescent girls worldwide” visit the Turning Point campaign.

International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) President Sarah Degnan Kambou and Director of the Asia Regional Office Ravi Verma, will present at a variety of events during the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), March 4 to 15 at the United Nations in New York.

Discussions at this year’s CSW gathering will center on eliminating and preventing all forms of violence against women and girls worldwide. Established in 1946 by the UN Economic and Social Council, the commission represents the primary policy-making body dedicated to gender equality and women’s advancement. Representatives of member states gather at the UN each year to assess global progress on gender equality, set standards and design policies to promote equality and women’s empowerment worldwide. This year’s CSW represents the 57^th such gathering.

At the event, Kambou and Verma will share their expertise on, among other topics, how to address the causes and consequences of child marriage and engage men and boys in preventing violence against women. In a March 11 presentation to UN delegates, Verma will draw on ICRW data as well as recent reports of sexual violence across the globe – including a gang rape that killed a young student in India – to emphasize the importance of involving men in efforts to eradicate violence against women.

“We are eager to see included in educational and community outreach activities more explicit discussions about masculinity and what it means to be a man,” Verma said. “Men and boys need to be viewed as partners, not as obstacles in our work to end violence.”

Kambou will touch on the same issue during a March 4 event focused on preventing gender-based violence through education and sport. She is expected to reference findings from Parivartan and Gender Equality Movement in Schools (GEMS), two ICRW programs that address gender equity and violence through sports and the classroom setting, respectively. Two days later, Kambou will moderate a panel discussion about policy recommendations for how to engage men in gender-based violence prevention. The recommendations were put forward by UNFPA and MenEngage, a network of nongovernmental organizations committed to involving men and boys in reducing gender inequality.

In another event during CSW, Verma will address child marriage, a form of violence against girls – and a violation of their human rights – that persists around the globe. Verma will focus his discussion on how the practice of child marriage manifests itself in South Asia and what steps can be taken to prevent it.