Violence Against Women

With an energized, standing-room-only crowd behind her, International Center for Research (ICRW) on Women President Geeta Rao Gupta on Oct. 1 told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that ending violence against women worldwide will require a comprehensive, adequately-funded approach that strengthens women economically and also engages men and boys.

She also stressed that if the U.S. wants to show moral leadership on the issue, it must ratify the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).

Without doing so, “the U.S. lacks a certain international credibility to be a true global partner with other countries in calling attention to violence against women,” Rao Gupta said to applause.

Rao Gupta was one of six witnesses invited to testify before the committee chaired by Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) The hearing aimed to make a case for the International Violence Against Women’s Act, which was introduced in 2008 by then Delaware Democratic Senator and current Vice President Joseph Biden and Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.). Kerry said Thursday he intends to reintroduce IVAWA, although he didn’t specify when.

Witnesses’ testimony centered on the importance of treating violence against women – particularly sexual violence in conflict zones – not as a “women’s issue,” but as a matter of human rights and international security. They stressed the need to expand programs that already are working and enforce existing laws against violence.

Rao Gupta told the committee that the ill treatment of women globally is rooted in a host of reasons, and combating it requires afar-reaching approach. She said that multiple sectors within a country must give women access to and control over economic resources to help reduce women’s vulnerability to violence.

“Violence against women is the single most significant barrier to women being able to access services or take advantage of all the economic investments we make in developing countries,” Rao Gupta told Sen. Ted Kaufman (D-Del.) during questioning.

“All of this economic growth that you see in these emerging countries is going to be capped at some point,” she said, “if women are dragging behind.”

Gillian Gaynair is ICRW's writer/editor.

India President Pratibha Patil this month released a report (PDF) by the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) and India’s Lawyer’s Collective Women’s Rights Initiative that addressed, among other objectives, whether the country’s new anti-domestic abuse law is effectively protecting women from harm.

The report’s release took place at the third conference on the implementation of India’s Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, which was established in 2005. Ravi Verma, ICRW’s regional director in Asia, presented the report’s findings during the event.

Combating violence against women globally is a longstanding area of work for ICRW. In India, the organization since the early 1990s has played a key role in gender-based abuse prevention research and policy-making. Data from ICRW studies were used in public campaigns to end violence and helped prompt India’s anti-domestic violence legislation.

In ICRW’s latest collaborative effort, the lawyer’s collective is, among other efforts, holding training workshops for police, judges and others responsible for enforcing the new law. ICRW’s role in the partnership is to measure the effectiveness of the collective’s interventions with various groups, including women.

At the conference, Verma discussed data from the third evaluation of the law’s impact in the states of Delhi and Rajasthan, which was conducted by ICRW and the collective.

ICRW found, in part, that the primary forms of violence against women were economic and physical; that police, judges and the protection officers who respond to cases still don’t have a clear understanding of the legislation’s provisions and many fail to recognize that sexual violence within a marriage violates the law.

Among its recommendations, the report said that the government should allocate funds and develop a process to hold accountable those responsible for implementing the law, among other suggestions.

"To make the act more effective, it is imperative to engage men and bring about an attitudinal change toward this issue," Verma added. "It is equally important to have a trained and gender-sensitized body of implementers of the law available for women and families in distress."

According to news reports, Patil called the monitoring and evaluation of the legislation critical to ensuring that it meets its intended objectives.

She said the government’s overall efforts to address constraints women face is not yet complete.

"Gender equality," Patil said, "is work in progress."

Gillian Gaynair is ICRW's writer/editor. ICRW's Jyoti Bahri contributed to this report from New Delhi.