After two weeks of fierce negotiations at the United Nations’ annual Commission on the Status of Women, on March 15 more than 130 governments committed to ending violence against women and girls, and reached strong agreements to promote gender equality and ensure access to sexual and reproductive health services.

The International Women’s Health Coalition and our amazing partners from around the world came out in force to the UN for the negotiations. Our agenda was clear: push governments to commit to concrete strategies to empower women and girls and end gender-based violence.

We met with instant opposition from conservative governments. Countries such as Iran, Russia, Egypt, and Syria joined with the Vatican in what The New York Times called “an unholy alliance.” IWHC staff and our women’s rights caucus of more than 100 activists worked around the clock to support progressive delegations to stand strong and not to cave in to pressure. We would not let a small but vocal minority use culture and religion as excuses to deny women their rights.

Our efforts prevailed and consensus was finally reached to loud applause from supportive governments such as Argentina, Brazil, Denmark, Mexico, Norway, the Philippines, South Africa, Switzerland, Turkey, United States, Uruguay, and even the small island of Tonga! As the “agreed conclusions” document was adopted, hundreds of women’s rights activists streamed into the negotiating room to join in the cheers.

For the first time at the UN, governments reached consensus that survivors of rape are entitled to emergency contraception to prevent unwanted pregnancy, and to timely and respectful forensic exams to support prosecution. They called for an end to child marriages. They agreed women’s right to control their sexuality is essential to preventing further violence. And they recognized the role that evidence-based sexuality education can play in reducing the harmful gender stereotypes that lead to violence.

In a sign of just how much was at stake, this year’s meeting received an unprecedented amount of media coverage after the Muslim Brotherhood condemned (and mischaracterized) the negotiations. IWHC featured prominently in many news articles, including in The Washington Post, The Guardian, Associated Press, ABC News, The Globe and Mail, Radio Free Europe, O Estado de S. Paulo, and Reuters.

Once again, we women have shown we’re an irresistible force. But our work is far from over. Now we must be vigilant to ensure that the agreements made at the UN are put into practice in local communities worldwide.

For that to happen, we must continue to support women’s groups to hold their own leaders to account.

Best regards,

Not only does VAWA protect women and girls in the United States from violence, but it also ensures that the U.S. is doing its part to protect girls from being forced into early marriages. Ending early and forced marriage is vital to the goal of ensuring that girls around the world are able to lead healthy, empowered, educated, and safe lives. As Senator Durbin, a champion on this issue, stated just after the vote, the bill’s “new mandate for a multisectoral strategy to end child marriage is an important step forward and now we must focus our efforts on ensuring it is developed without delay and its implementation is fully funded.”

The passage of this bill is a testament to how various communities that care about the health and safety of women and girls can come together to fight for what is necessary and what is right. It is also a testament to the hard work of steadfast leaders in the United States Congress on this issue, such as Senator Durbin (D-IL), Congresswoman McCollum (D-MN), Congressman Aaron Schock (R-IL), and former Senator Olympia Snowe (R-ME). We congratulate them on this accomplishment and thank them for their service to women and girls around the world.

For more reactions from communities and Congress, please see:

• Reps. McCollum and Schock Applaud House Passage of Child Marriage Prevention Strategy in Violence Against Women Act
• Interagency Working Group – “Congress Passes Violence Against Women Act”

A Way to Justice: Engaging Men for Women’s Rights and Gender Transformation from william nessen on Vimeo.

Across the world, in places expected and unexpected, men are joining women to challenge patriarchy, end men’s violence against women and promote gender equality.

To capture a sense of this growing movement, Sonke commissioned filmmaker William Nessen to interview leading activists at the MenEngage Africa symposium in October 2009 to create a film, A Way to Justice: Engaging Men for Women’s Rights and Gender Transformation

Focusing on four personal stories from Africa – with an additional eight interviewees as analysts  – the film follows each through terrible times to each one’s eventual triumph, as they confront and transcend the forces that have wreaked havoc with their and their nation’s life.

David Tamba, a Sierra Leonean running from civil war whose wife is gang-raped by rebels, spends a decade in refugee camps.  Pascal Akimana, then an 11-year old Burundian child fleeing both his father’s and his country’s violence, finds even more violence across the border in the DRC, where soldiers batter him senseless and rape his younger sister.  Jennifer Gatsi, a Botswanan-Namibian woman growing up with a father who beats her mother nightly, is forced to wed a violent husband who infects her and two small children with HIV. And Trevor Davies, a white Zimbabwean photojournalist, whose career-focus blinds him to the dire struggle of a son who dies of AIDS. Each of the four feels defeated by the violence and loss they’ve suffered.

Eventually, Tamba overcomes his shame-filled powerlessness to form an organization of men confronting violence and unfair gender roles in West African refugee camps. He goes on to form a national movement in Sierra Leone to push successfully for historic laws defending women’s and children’s rights.

Having sworn to join the rebel movement and kill his violent father, Akimana realizes that reconciliation are his and his country’s only righteous path.

Davies finds a solution to his guilty pain and a key to talking with men resistant to women’s rights by campaigning for a “fatherhood revolution” – a more responsible, caring form of male parenting to benefit women, children and men alike.

To help other women with HIV, Gatsi focuses on changing young men and thus herself rises above the intimate physical and emotional hell created by the men in her life.

As other of the interviewees — Gary Barker, Tyler Crone, Lydia Mungherera, Lynn Ngugi, James Arana, Abhijit Das, Dawn Cavanagh, Jonah Gokova – punctuate with concluding reflections, refugee Tamba sweeps the viewer along toward the film’s powerful emotive end.

Learn more about Sonke Gender Justice here.

I just came across a study, which was released at the end of 2010 about a phenomenon that, I believe is pretty specific to Latin America: Women’s Police Stations (WPS).

The first WPS opened in São Paulo, Brazil in 1985 and now similar ones can be found in 13 Latin American countries. The study, Women’s Police Stations in Latin America: An Entry Point for Stopping Violence and Gaining Access to Justice (link to PDF), was carried out by the Center for Planning and Social Science, an NGO based in Quito, Ecuador and it collected data from Brazil, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Peru.

Some facts about WPS in Latin America:

• They are staffed by women
• They are located in a separate building or have access to a separate entrance from regular police stations
• They include a multidisciplinary team that works in coordination with local NGOs devoted to gender specific matters
• Their main goal is to make the problem of violence against women more visible as a public, collective, and punishable issue.

To understand the historical context behind the WPS, the study provides some background information:

The establishment of women’s police stations (WPS) in the four countries included in this study, namely Brazil, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Peru, as well as in others in the region, has its roots in social and political processes. One is the struggle by feminist and women’s movements to break the silence on domestic violence, demand integrated and comprehensive services, and defend women’s rights. The other is the recognition of the state’s obligations to provide access to justice and to prevent, punish, and eliminate violence against women. The two are interrelated and have been carried out at the local, national, regional, and international levels. As is described in what follows, in a relatively brief period, women’s right to a life free of violence has been formally recognized and several mechanisms have been created so they can exercise that right, among which the WPS play an important role.

To place the phenomenon of WPS in Latin America, some figures from a previous study (link to PDF):

• In Nicargua, a study revealed that 48% of women who had at one time been married or in a relationship had suffered verbal or psychological abuse by their partner or ex-partner, 27% had suffered physical abuse, and 13% sexual abuse
• In Ecuador, a national survey found that 41% of women who had at one time been married or in a relationship had suffered psychological violence and verbal abuse, 31% physical violence, and 12% sexual abuse
• Regarding Brazil, in the city of Sao Paulo, 41.9% of women who had at one time been married or in a relationship had experienced emotional abuse by their intimate partner, 27.2% had experienced physical abuse, and 10.1% had suffered sexual abuse. In Zona da Mata de Pernambuco (the entire province, except for the city of Recife), 48.8% of women who had at one time been married or in a relationship had suffered emotional abuse from their intimate partners, 33.8% had experienced physical violence, and 14.3% sexual violence.
• A similar survey carried out in Lima, Peru, found that 57.8% of women who had at one time been married or in a relationship had experienced emotional abuse from their husbands/partners, 48.6% had suffered physical abuse, and 22.5% sexual abuse. In the department of Cusco, 68.5% of women who had at one time been married or in a relationship reported that their husbands or partners had subjected them to emotional abuse, 61.0% had suffered physical violence, and 46.7% sexual violence.

What makes this study so compelling for me is that, when analyzing the success of WPS, it took into consideration different perspectives to explore how local cultural conceptions blend together and either enable or prevent women’s access to the justice system. The researchers worked under the premise that “women in situations of domestic violence, the WPS, and other actors have diverse perceptions of access to justice that do not always coincide with formal and institutional conceptions, nor do they always refer to imposing a penalty”.

While the research points to several flaws and shortcomings in the WPS system and certainly highlights many obstacles that prevent women’s access to the justice system, it does address what I believe to be the main success of this approach to domestic violence:

In some ways, WPS contributions have been impressive: their very high level of visibility transmits the message that violence is no longer a private matter, but rather a violation of women’s rights that must be addressed in the public sphere. As a result, the majority of women in the four research sites, albeit in different proportions, consider that the WPS are contributing to reducing abuse and increasing access to justice. Likewise, they continue to be an important entry point into the formal system of justice as well as the range of specialized services in their communities. They share these achievements with diverse actors who together have implemented multiple actions over recent decades to support social transformation. For this reason, analyzing women’s different experiences with ending violence shows that this is a result of multiple factors, and thus, cannot be attributed exclusively to the work of the WPS.

And while this might not be the end to it, it is certainly a good beginning.

Not only are many of these needs going unmet, but according to an Amnesty International (AI) report that released today, sexual violence against women is rampant in the camps where displaced people are living.

Watch the below video from AI, featuring several women telling their stories about being raped in the camps they call home. AI’s new study is not the first coverage of post-earthquake sexual assault in Haiti: news outlets covered the story last March as well.

The report examines the problem of violence and its relationship to HIV and AIDS in Brazil, Uruguay, Chile and Argentina as part of a larger report entitled “Two faces of one reality: Violence against women and the feminization of HIV / AIDS”, developed by Gestos in partnership with the Fundación para Estudio e Investigación de la Mujer (FEIM- Argentina), Fundación Popular Salud (EPES – Chile) and IWHC partner Salud Mujer in Uruguay (MYSU). It will be presented at an upcoming event bringing together women living with HIV, activists, health professionals and AIDS program managers AIDS in the nine northeastern  of Latin America.

It is estimated that of the 630,000 people infected with HIV in Brazil, 34.9% are female. Although fewer women than men have the virus, statistics released in the latest report of UNAIDS in November show that the proportion of women infected for every person with AIDS has increased over the past 6 years. These murders are frequently at the hands of intimate partners.

According to recent data, 10 women were murdered daily in Brazil, from 1997 to 2007, totaling 41,532 murder victims for a rate of 4.2 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. In Europe, the murder rate for women is 0.5 per 100 000 inhabitants. In Pernambuco, 290 women were murdered in 2009. This corresponds to about four women every 5 days.

For a PDF version of the report (in Portuguese), click here.

For more on IWHc’s work in Brazil, click here.

To learn more about the efforts of our partner MYSU in Uruguay, click here.

This sweeping language would, for example,  keep U.S. government officials from engaging in international conferences – the G-8 or G-20 or at the United Nations – if participants we going to discuss the implications of unsafe abortion on maternal mortality, or if officials from other countries that receive US assistance were describing their own efforts to increase access to safe abortion services.

What is perhaps the most concerning about this latest barrage is that during debate of a bill to increase U.S. efforts to prevent and provide support for survivors of violence, some policymakers felt that the way they could best contribute is to expand abortion restrictions beyond those that have been in law for years.

IWHC applauds the leadership of Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and John Kerry (D-MA) in supporting women’s health and rights, ensuring committee support for the status quo rather than additional abortion restrictions.

IVAWA was passed out of committee on a party-line vote – though the full Senate is not expected to debate it before the session of Congress ends.

One of my favorites is Take Back The Tech!, a collaborative online campaign that takes place during the 16 Days. It is a call to everyone – especially women and girls – to take control of technology to end violence against women.

This year they’ve been encouraging campaign supporters to take actions to address the ways that technology is used to bully, intimidate, and otherwise encourage violence against women in both online and offline spaces.

Here are a few of my favorites:

• Share tactics for staying safe online with your friends and online contacts. The UN estimates that 95% of aggressive behaviour, harassment, abusive language and denigrating images in online spaces are aimed at women, and come from partners or former partners.
• Challenge gender stereotypes in the concept of “expertise.” The reason often given by members of the media for not featuring women experts is because there aren’t any who know the topic at hand. We all know that there are prominent women leaders in the social, economic, political and cultural spheres, but they are often passed over by journalists in favor of male experts. For information and resources about how to get more women’s voices into the media, check out the Op Ed Project.

• Support the work of feminist radio stations and help widen their reach. Considering the fact that there are 796 million adults worldwide who are unable to read and write—and well over half (64%) are women, radio can be a very powerful and valuable (and relatively inexpensive) dissemination tool.

Browse Take Back the Tech’s Daily Action Library to get more ideas for actions that you can take to make communication and information sharing easier and better for women’s rights advocates.

While we hear a lot about the prevalence of violence against women, we hear little about the consequences.  Beyond being a gross violation of human rights, violence has demonstrable impacts on a woman’s health and her ability to meaningfully participate in her community.  Gender inequality and violence against women are also associated with a substantial number of new HIV infections among women. In Swaziland, which has one of the highest prevalence rates of HIV globally, one-third of girls have been subjected to sexual violence, with nearly half experiencing violence prior to the age of 18.  

IWHC’s  Board Chair, Brian Brink, published a piece in Friday’s  Mail and Guardian about how gender inequality and violence has helped to fuel the HIV/AIDS pandemic.  Despite rising infections in women and exemplary local programs, the world has a ways to go before the realities of women’s lives become the centerpiece of programs and policies. 

To find out more about policy responses to violence against women, read Seven Things the World Can Do to End Violence Against Women, published in collaboration with Women Won’t Wait, the World AIDS Campaign and the International AIDS Women’s Caucus. 

To kick off the week, here are seven things the world can do to end violence against women, from a publication of the same name that we released last year in collaboration with the World AIDS Campaign, International Aids Women Caucus (IAWC), and Women Won’t Wait.

Policies, programmes, and laws that uphold women’s rights and work to end gender inequality are urgently needed at local, provincial and national levels to protect women and girls from all forms of violence, including sexual abuse or coerced sex and its consequences, such as HIV infection. Continuous advocacy, strategic investment, political will, and committed leadership are essentialto addressing violence against women and HIV and AIDS.

1. Establish and implement laws, programmes, and policies for zero-tolerance of abuse and violence. Political, civic, traditional, religious and other leaders should publicly condemn all forms of sexual harassment, abuse, and violence and initiate and implement laws, programmes, and policies that guarantee the fulfillment of the human rights of women.
2. Make health services available. Sexual and reproductive health services that are adequately equipped to screen for and respondto violence against women should be offered to all women, adolescents, and girls and encompass information and services for the prevention, diagnosis, and treatmentof sexual violence, unwanted pregnancy, and STIs, including HIV. To ensure that these services are accessibleto young women, they must be affordable, non-judgmental, confidential, available outside of school hours, and accessible without parental consent requirements. These services should be available to all women outside of normal working hours, providing for a 24 hour service.
3. Integrate Emergency Health Services in public facilities. Emergency services such as Post Exposure Prophylaxis, emergency contraception, and referrals to safe abortion services should be available in hospitals, clinics and public facilities such as police stations.T services must ensure confidentiality, and be accompanied by counseling and special/ private rooms for consultation and rest.
4. Guarantee comprehensive sexuality education. Comprehensive sexuality education in schools whichis factual and non judgmental should be available to all students, beginning in the primary levels. Such education gives young people information about their rights, their bodies, their sexual and reproductive health, and their sexuality.It helps them develop the skills to negotiate safe sex, establish gender equality, respect the right to consensual relationships, and end violence and coercion.
5. Conduct awareness and education campaigns. Awareness and prevention messages about violence against women and HIV should be effectively promoted.
6. Create safe spaces for girls inside schools and for women in their communities. Schools, youth programmes, and communities must have clear policies and interventions to preventand punish all forms of violence and abuse, including harassment, in these settings.
7. Train health care providers and provide comprehensive services. Health care providers should be trained to recognize and treat emotional, physical,and sexual abuse among women and youth andto screen for violence among women, including providing referrals and confidential, non-judgmental counseling. Health care providers should routinely offer STI and HIV counseling and testing, emergency contraception, and post-exposure prophylaxis to prevent HIV infection. Women, including young women, should also receive pregnancy counseling and testing, and safe abortion services if desired.