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Lesson 9 Gender-Based Violence

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ALLEN GLENN
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29 views

Lesson 9 Gender-Based Violence

Uploaded by

ALLEN GLENN
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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University of Baguio

Assumption Road, Baguio City 2600

Gender and Society

Topic: Gender – based Violence

Objectives:

1. Contextualize a contemporary definition of gender-based violence that is relevant to


local and global conditions.
2. Identify the types and sites of gender-based violence.
3. Distinguish traditional assumptions of gender-based violence from actual and legal
definitions of gender-based violence.

Introduction

Gender-based violence is violence against men and women based on their


subordinate status in society. It includes any act or threat that inflict physical, sexual, or
psychological harm on man or woman because of their gender. In most cultures,
traditional beliefs, norms, and social institutions legitimize and therefore perpetuate
violence against women.

Gender-based violence includes physical, sexual, and psychological violence such as


domestic violence; sexual abuse, including rape and sexual abuse of children by
family members; forced pregnancy; sexual slavery; traditional practices harmful to men
and women, such as honor killings, burning or acid throwing, genital mutilation,
violence in armed conflict, such as murder and rape; and emotional abuse, such as
coercion and abusive language. Trafficking of women and girls for prostitution and
human trafficking for men, forced marriage, sexual harassment and intimidation at work
are additional examples of violence against women.

Gender violence occurs in both the ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres. Such violence not
only occurs in the family and in the general community but is sometimes also
perpetuated by the state through policies or the actions of agents of the state such as
the police, military, or immigration authorities. Gender-based violence happens in all
societies, across all social classes, with women particularly at risk from men they know.
The following types and sites of gender-based violence present an insight into the
nature of gender-based violence.

Types of Gender-Based Violence

• Overt physical abuse (includes battering, sexual assault, at home or in the workplace)

• Psychological abuse (includes deprivation of liberty, forced marriage, sexual


harassment, at home or in the workplace)

• Deprivation of resources needed for physical and psychological well-being


(including health care, nutrition, education, means of livelihood)

• Treatment of women as commodities (includes human trafficking for sexual


exploitation and slavery)

Sites of Gender – based Violence

Family is one of the primary sites of gender violence. It prepares its members for social
life, forms gender stereotypes and perceptions of division of labor between the sexes. It
is the arena where physical abuses (spousal battering, sexual assault, sexual abuse)
and/or psychological abuses occur. (Domestic violence can also take such forms as
confinement, forced marriage of woman arranged by her family without her consent,
threats, insults and neglect; overt control of a woman’s sexuality through either forced
pregnancy or forced abortion.) Because violence within the family and household
takes place in the home, it is often seen as a ‘private’ issue and information about it is
lacking.

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Community/Society is a group sharing common social, cultural, religious or
ethnic belonging, it perpetuates existing family structure and power inequalities in
family and society. The community justifies the behavior of male and female abusers
aimed at establishing control supports harmful traditional practices such as battering
and corporal punishment.

Workplace can also be a site of violence. Either in governmental service or in a business


company, women are vulnerable to sexual aggression (harassment, intimidation) and
commercialized violence (trafficking for sexual exploitation)

State legitimizes power inequalities in family and society and perpetuates gender-
based violence through enactment of discriminatory laws and policies or through the
discriminatory application of the law. It is responsible for tolerance of gender violence
on an unofficial level (i.e. in the family and in the community). To the extent that it is the
State’s recognized role to sanction certain norms that protect individual life and dignity
and maintain collective peace, it is the State’s obligation to develop and implement
measures that redress gender violence.

Concepts:

A) The primary inequality that gives rise to gender-based violence is the power
inequality between women and men.

B) The majority of perpetrators of gender-based violence are men. However, even


though no society is free from it, male violence against women varies in degree and
intensity according to the specific circumstances. Many men choose to reject
dominant stereotypes of violent, controlling masculinity.

C) Some types of violence against women are perpetrated by women. Some authors
(e.g. Francine Pickup, in Ending Violence Against Women: A Challenge for
Development and Humanitarian Work, Oxfam GB 2001) point out that oftentimes,
women commit violence to ensure their own survival and security within a social,
economic, and political context that is shaped and dominated by men.

D.) Gender-based violence is not exclusively a woman’s concern. It is both a cause and
consequence of gender perceptions. The use of the term ‘gender-based violence’
provides a new context in which to examine and understand the phenomenon of
violence against women. It shifts the focus from women as victims to gender and the
unequal power relationships between women and men created and maintained by
gender stereotypes as the basic underlying cause of violence against women.

Frameworks Against Gender-based Violence

Violence against women was defined in 1993 by the United Nations Declaration on the
Elimination of Violence against Women as “any act of gender-based violence that
results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to
women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty,
whether occurring in public or in private life”.

The Declaration stated that such violence encompasses, but is not limited to, the
following:

• physical, sexual, and psychological violence in the family including battering,


sexual abuse of women in the household.
• dowry-related violence, marital rape, female genital mutilation, and other
harmful traditional practices, non-spousal violence and violence related to
exploitation.
• physical, sexual, and psychological violence in the community including rape,
sexual abuse, sexual harassment, and intimidation at work, in educational
institutions and elsewhere.
• trafficking of women and forced prostitution.
• physical, sexual, and psychological violence perpetuated or condoned by a
State, wherever it occurs.

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This definition was expanded in 1995 by the Fourth World Conference on Women in its
Beijing Platform for Action, which added that such violence includes:

• forced sterilization and forced abortion.


• coercive or forced contraceptive use.
• female infanticide and prenatal sex selection
• women’s human rights violations in situations of armed conflict – particularly
murder, systematic rape, sexual slavery and forced pregnancy.

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