16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence

It is twelve o’clock in the village, and most people have long since gone to bed. Then from one house there is the sound of raised voices, then shouting, and finally screaming. A woman’s shrill voice cries out desperately. ‘God help me! Save me! He’ll kill me! For God’s sake help!’

And people do help. Within minutes people are hurrying from their surrounding houses, gathering outside the house of screams, demanding admission. The screaming stops, the door opens, and the neighbours take the woman into their protection. Next day there will be an ‘indaba’ in the village to investigate the domestic dispute, counsel the couple, and advise the husband on how to treat his wife properly.

Here, on a small scale, we see a nice example of action by civil society to save a woman from domestic violence. It is the sort of community action which would have been common in traditional societies a hundred years ago. But it is the sort of collective action that is rare today, with urbanization, and families living as strangers, locked behind high garden walls. Who would dare to risk the terrors of the night to ‘interfere with a domestic dispute’, or even to risk interrupting the work of burglars?

Nowadays the problem of violence against women is much more complex, and women are more vulnerable to various forms of horrific violence in the present ‘civilisation’ of our global village. And so it is, in today’s world, that civil society’s action to protect women also has to be global. First organized in 1991, this year will see another 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence which run from 25 November through to 10 December. This annual campaign is co-ordinated for civil society by the Centre for Women’s Global Leadership.

It might be thought that such a campaign against gender violence concerns only those sections of civil society which are particularly concerned with feminist issues. Not true. The campaign instead illustrates the need for all sections of civil society to unite around fundamental issues of human rights, democracy and good governance.

Let us return the example of the woman screaming in the dead of night. Why is it a matter for civil society? Why not just telephone the police, who act for us in such matters? Simply because, in most countries, the police will not be willing to take action. They will regard this as a domestic matter. In their minds, and probably also according to tradition and customary law, a man has a right to ‘discipline’ his wife.

In most countries, police are also part of the patriarchal state apparatus which serves to keep women in their place. The notion that ‘the man is the head of household’ is the most sacred principle of the patriarchal state. Only if a man has exceeded his patriarchal authority, in such a way as to bring male authority into disrepute, might a husband be arrested. In other words, as I once heard a judge advise an accused, ‘a wife may be beaten with a stick but not an axe’.

And the modern state is often more seriously implicated. In addition to allowing domestic violence and marital rape, it perpetrates its own forms of violence against women. Violence and rape against women have become institutionalized in police stations and prisons, and have become strategies of war. Under the law in some countries, ‘honour’ killings are tolerated and rape victims are considered guilty of adultery.

Violence against women is not a mere welfare or humanitarian issue. It is an issue which goes to the heart of democracy and good governance. If all citizens are to be equal in law, and before the law, then there can be no legal protection for those perpetrating violence against women. But it is precisely as women reject their subordination in a male dominated society, and throw off their age-old belief in submission to men, that they increasingly meet the fist and the whip.

The patriarchal state increasingly has to rely on the fist and the whip because they have no ideological defence for their subordination and domestication of women. Almost every state has ratified the important UN conventions and protocols guaranteeing democracy and good governance, including the equal treatment of women.

And herein lies the strategy for the global campaign. The campaign strategy must be based on exposing violence against women, and revealing the extent to which this contradicts governments’ international commitments, and even – to a large extent - their own constitutions and laws. In such a campaign, civil society fulfills its time-honoured role of demanding accountability from governments. In other words, civil society demands that governments’ actions must measure up to their commitments.

And so it is that the campaign to end violence against women is not a specialized concern of the women’s movement, but is central to civil society’s role in pushing governments to live up to their commitments on democracy and good governance. These commitments are all premised on the basic principle of equal human rights for all, without discrimination.

For more information about the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence, contact: Center for Women’s Global Leadership, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. e-mail: cwgl@igc.org; website: www.cwgl.rutgers.edu.

Let the debate begin on the CIVICUS Blog!.

Warmest regards,

Sara Hlupekile Longwe