Stop Violence Against Women
“I really don’t know what it was that evening that made me decide to call the police, but I always say it was the sight of cleaning up my own blood.” Lorraine, a British woman, was regularly beaten by her partner for eight years before telling anybody. “People have asked me why I didn’t just leave, but …. I was very, very frightened of him. So you get to the point where you live with it, it becomes a normal pattern of life, you adapt, you cope, you hide it.” In the UK, emergency services receive an average of one call per minute about violence in the family.
From birth to death, in times of peace as well as war, women face discrimination and violence at the hands of the state, the community and the family.
Domestic violence was a particular focus for AI’s campaigning in 2006. AI holds the state responsible when it takes inadequate measures to protect women from domestic violence – by not introducing or implementing specific laws or procedures, not providing specialist training or health care, or not making available or supporting shelters or other services. If a state does not make sufficient effort to prevent, investigate and punish acts of violence against women, then it shares responsibility for the abuses.
AI worked throughout the year as part of a wider worldwide movement to address violence against women as a human rights issue. The UN Secretary-General published an in-depth study of violence against women in all its forms in October. The report called on states to secure gender equality, bring laws and practices in line with international standards, collect data to strengthen policy and planning, and allocate adequate resources and funding. In November, AI members welcomed a Council of Europe campaign on domestic violence, and urged member states to deliver on the campaign’s goals of abolishing discriminatory laws, strengthening services for survivors and challenging social prejudices.
AI called on governments to implement its new 14-Point Programme for the Prevention of Domestic Violence, which calls on governments to protect the physical and mental wellbeing of women who have been abused. It insists that government policies, practices and laws must not discriminate against women, and calls on governments to consult and work closely with women victims and survivors, and with organizations with experience of addressing domestic violence.
The need for a place of safety was the focus of AI’s 16 Days of Activism to mark the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women on 25 November. Through 16 web-based appeal cases, AI urged governments to set up and fund shelters for women fleeing violence in the home. Some governments provide no shelters or support for women facing domestic abuse, such as in Saudi Arabia. In other countries, for example Belgium or Mongolia, official support is sporadic or insufficient. AI highlighted the particular difficulties of migrant women in Denmark, at risk of losing residency rights if they leave an abusive marriage, and of Native American and Alaska Native women in the USA who cannot access shelters that provide culturally appropriate forms of help.
In August, the Director General of the State Police in Albania reported that he had directed the police to implement AI’s recommendations published in March in Albania: Violence against women in the family – “It’s not her shame”(AI Index: EUR 11/002/2006). AI had called for the police to treat seriously and investigate reports of family violence, to protect women complainants and witnesses, to facilitate the work of women’s organizations, and to discipline police officers who “neglect or treat with indifference” complaints of violence against women.
In Sierra Leone: Women face human rights abuses in the informal legal sector(AI Index: AFR 51/002/2006), published in May, AI showed how powers exercised by traditional rulers through customary courts can deprive women of rights. Failures by police to respond to appeals for help and by local courts to exercise their jurisdiction frequently leave women at the mercy of discriminatory customary laws.
Failure to tackle high levels of sexual violence reflect social and cultural attitudes that trivialize the crimes and entrench discrimination against women, AI reported in June in Sexual violence against women and girls in Jamaica: “Just a little sex”(AI Index: AMR 38/002/2006). Jamaican law leaves women without the protection of the law in cases of marital rape, incest or sexual harassment, and in court, women’s testimony is explicitly given less weight than that of men.
The threat of sexual violence in the home and community affects women’s ability to travel to market or to work and to access health and education services, AI reported in September in Papua New Guinea: Violence against women – not inevitable, never acceptable!(AI Index: ASA 34/002/2006). In meetings with AI, police and other officials showed little understanding of the state’s obligations to protect women.
In October, Hamda Fahad Jassem Al-Thani was allowed to join her husband, and thanked AI for its appeals. “I ask you to help end my suffering and to help me return to my husband, whom I chose entirely of my own accord, this being the most fundamental of my God-given rights, as enshrined in international human rights conventions,” she had said to AI. A member of the ruling family in Qatar, she had been abducted from Egypt by the state security services and detained in secret following her marriage without her family’s consent in 2002.
http://web.amnesty.org/actforwomen/index-eng