WHRNET: What have been the implications (negative and positive) for the women's movement and for governments of framing the struggle against violence against women as a human rights issue?

Charlotte Bunch: For women, this has been empowering as it has moved such violence out of the category of the individual unfortunate occurrence, or "just life," into something that is political and that society says should not happen in a powerful way by calling it a violation of basic human rights. The Center for Women's Global Leadership just completed an electronic survey about this issue (go to www.cwgl.rutgers.edu for the full results) and many women talked about how much it had strengthened them or the women they work with to know that the UN and/or governments said that this violence was wrong. This has been part of women seeing themselves not just as victims, but as subjects with rights they can demand, including the right to a life free of violence.

Framing violence against women as a human rights issue has helped to make various forms of such violence more visible and added to the perception of the seriousness of the problem. For example, by showing how domestic violence often parallels other forms of violation seen as unacceptable, like torture, or that rape in armed conflict can constitute a war crime has increased the pressure that these issues be taken onto local, national, and global agendas.

As a human rights issue, the effort to end violence against women becomes a government's obligation, not just a good idea. This means that women can work to hold governments at all levels accountable for their failure to meet this obligation. In this effort, women have created and gained access to a variety of mechanisms (national, regional and international) used by the human rights community in the effort to expose human rights abuses and to hold governments accountable to their obligations. These gains include the appointment of a UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, the adoption of the Inter-American Convention on Violence, the Women's Protocol to the African Convention on Human Rights, the inclusion of sexual violence and gender-based persecution in the statutes of the International Criminal Court, etc. These regional and global gains build on local pressure from women and have in turn propelled women's efforts nationally to find ways to hold governments accountable. Perhaps the most widespread increase in women's use of human rights instruments nationally has been through the women's convention (CEDAW) and government reports to its treaty body (and in the future its optional protocol) as means of putting pressuring on national governments. Women are also making more use of mainstream non-woman specific human rights bodies like the Special Rapporteur on extra judicial executions who has addressed issues like honor crimes and other treaty bodies like the Committee on Economic and Social Rights to look at gender dimensions of those violations. All of these add to the variety of strategies women can use to seek redress for violence against women and to work to prevent it in the future.

I also believe that the framing of violence against women as a human rights issue has profoundly challenged and brought dynamism to the human rights movement. In the effort to respond to many issues raised by looking closely at violence against women from the public/private dichotomy to the issues of due diligence and non-state actors, the human rights movement has learned from feminist discourse and expanded its scope as well as added its base of support.

The only negative implication that I see from this has been the tendency of some to rely too much on legal standards and/or to build unrealistic expectations of what governments can and will do about violence against women, which can make some women skeptical about human rights claims. However from my perspective, the framing of violence as a human rights issue was never meant to eliminate other strategies for addressing it, nor did I expect that such naming would bring a quick end to the problem. This is, and will be for some time, an issue that cuts deeply and operates at many levels, and therefore necessitates multiple strategies. Framing violence against women as a human rights issue is a powerful shift that adds to our tools for change, but it is not a short-cut for the hard political/cultural struggle that such a profound challenge to patriarchal power requires.

WHRNET: How has this women's human rights framework influenced other struggles made by the women's movement, such as the one on reproductive and sexual rights?

Charlotte Bunch: Framing women's rights as human rights goes far beyond just the issue of violence against women, as important as that issue is. It has encouraged women to pose many of our struggles/issues as questions of "rights" not just of "needs" or "desires." This involves seeing women as full citizens who have the right to participate in the shaping of all social matters, including in what is understood and treated as fundamental "human rights."

Once we realize that many of women's experiences have by and large been absent from the prevailing discussions of human rights (and many other) issues, it becomes clearer that women (like other excluded groups) must expand the scope of human rights if it is to realize its goal of being universal. That is, all groups must define those particular things that prevent the expression of their full humanity, if human rights struggles are to be about the rights of all humans.

This understanding has enabled women to look at the particular blocks to their socio-economic as well as civil and political human rights and to articulate issues like land and inheritance rights and the feminization of poverty in human rights terms. Thus women have joined the growing movement for social and economic rights which seeks to hold governments accountable for the well-being of their citizens, as well as to find ways to hold international actors like the IMF and multinational corporations accountable for the human rights implications of their policies. P The human rights framework has also been embraced by many working for reproductive and sexual rights as a powerful language for articulating the centrality of control over one's body as a crucial starting point for exercising human rights. Just as human rights issues like torture are centered in what happens to the body, so too, the assertion of sexual rights forces an acknowledgement that the denial of control over one's body/sexuality must be seen as central to human rights.

WHRNET: Why do you think the women's movement has focused so much on legal strategies at the local and global level instead of addressing the underlying social, political and economic connections that keep the capitalist patriarchy so alive?

Charlotte Bunch: First, I do not entirely agree with the underlying premise of this question which implies that the women's movement has focused on legal strategies at the expense of addressing capitalist patriarchy. I see that as a false dichotomy. In my over thirty years as a feminist, I have seen a great many women's efforts locally and globally to address the underlying social, political, and economic causes of women's oppression all over the world. But we, like other social movements, have not had very much success in figuring out how to change these underlying factors. Because we have not yet had more success in bringing change on these difficult issues does not mean that women have not addressed them, or that we have failed on them because we focused on legal strategies. Rather it tells us how difficult such change is.

Further, legal strategies are important as they can bring many immediate concrete possibilities for improvement in women's everyday lives. It does matter if domestic violence is legally outlawed or if marital rape is considered a crime when a woman tries to bring an end to these violations. In the effort to challenge capitalist patriarchy, small steps that improve women's situation legally can still be useful and often create rising expectations that encourage women to work for more changes.

Even when women may not be able to access those legal rights, it is easier to challenge the socio-economic context that prevents her access to them if those are defined as rights she should have in the first place. So I do not see legal changes or the work to establish human rights standards as making other challenges to power harder or less likely to be achieved. On the contrary when women know that something is defined legally as their right, and yet, they do not have access to that right, it can add to their determination to challenge the conditions that prevent the exercise of these rights. This could and should help us to address the underlying social, political, and economic connections more effectively over time.

WHRNET: Given the militarization of the planet and all the different fundamentalisms we are confronting now, including the economic one, what could be new strategies for the women's movement to bring about key changes in our societies?

Charlotte Bunch: If I really knew the answer to this question, I would be shouting it from the mountaintop!! So here I am exploring my hunches about ways that we need to move rather than outlining "new strategies."

Feminists must find ways to take on the debates in our societies in new and more effective ways. Some of what we see in fundamentalisms is a backlash in reaction to feminist successes in asserting women's rights and putting new issues like reproductive rights and violence against women on national and global agendas. This backlash has put us on the defensive, but we need to find a way to be more pro-active, to re-assert our visions and take back the dialogue. One of the important things this requires is engaging more with youth (females and males) about their hopes for the future so that feminist messages reflect and speak to the realities of their lives. I think that in this effort, we also need to utilize the media, popular culture, and the internet better as these are central to young people's lives.

Better articulation of our visions and values in ways that will convince more people to support women's human rights is central to this task. Part of human rights is protection and defending the rights of minorities, or those whose views are different from the mainstream of their communities, and in this regard, women's human rights can and should help women to assert themselves when they do not agree with their cultures. But for our visions to prevail, we must convince more people that societies need to change and to do this, we must find more effective ways to discuss the critical issues of women, culture, and human rights.

Sexual, racial, gender violence and other forms of discrimination and violence in a culture cannot be eliminated without changing culture. Social movements are and should be about making cultural as well as political and economic change. We must address the issue of cultural change directly, and not be afraid to assert that we are about such change. However, we must also be clear that this does not mean changing some "backward" cultures to be more "western," but rather changing those aspects of all our cultures that oppress women. In the US fro example, far from having achieved a feminist world, we are engaged in what is called domestically the "culture wars," being fought over the issues that feminists have raised. Yet international talk about "culture," tends to be a code word for "tradition" - as if there were not many problems of violence against women and discrimination in "modern" or Western culture as well. We must reshape the discussion of culture and human rights to break through this debate.

Regarding militarism and economic exploitation, we must challenge these directly of course and many women are doing so. I also think we need to show more clearly how they are linked to problems like violence against women (the continuum of violence at home and in the world, etc.) and how they depend on maintaining sexual and racial hierarchies. Finally, feminists need to be creating new strategies, exploring new directions, and talking about the values we want to build upon in our cultures - in short projecting a vision of what could be as well as making a critique of what is.