Intl Women's Day: Culture no excuse for violence

Press release from the Human Development Programme, Secretariat of the Pacific Community

Culture no excuse for violence, says UN head on International Women’s Day

United Nations, New York, March 8, 2007: The message has come through loud and clear from the most powerful men and women of the United Nations – violence against girls and women is a major problem across all countries and societies, including the Pacific, and culture is no justification for it.

“Violence against women and girls makes its hideous imprint on every continent, country and culture,” said UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, speaking at the UN’s International Women’s Day (IWD) event, whose theme this year was Ending Impunity for Violence against Women and Girls.

“Yet the reality is that, too often, it is tolerated under the fallacious cover of cultural practices and norms,” said Mr Ki-moon, of the Republic of Korea. Too often, violence was condoned through “tacit silence and passivity” by governments and law enforcers.

He added: “It is a time to focus on the concrete actions that all of us can and must take to prevent and eliminate violence against women and girls.

“I call on every one of us to take this issue with the deadly seriousness that it deserves, not only on International Women’s Day, but every day.”

To the applause of a packed UN conference room, the Secretary-General also said that he had asked the General Assembly to devote an agenda item every year to considering violence against women.

He also urged the Security Council to “establish a mechanism dedicated to monitoring violence against women and girls” under UN Security Resolution 1325, which promotes the role of women in conflict prevention and resolution.

The Secretary-General’s strong call for action was echoed by a line-up of heavyweight UN office-holders, including the President of the Security Council, Dumisani Shadrack Kumalo, of South Africa, and the female president of the General Assembly, Sheikha Haya Rashed Al Khalifa of Bahrain.

Sheikha Haya told a conference room packed with delegates attending the final days of the 51st Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) that as most sexual and physical violence against women and girls happened at home, changes in attitudes had to start in the home.

An American speaker, Reverend Jacques Andre De Graff of the 10,000-member international advocacy organisation One Hundred Black Men, said the time had come for “men of goodwill” to stand up and speak out against the “obscenity” of discrimination and violence against women.

Men in every country needed to “link arms and rally against demonic discrimination and its more evil twin, violence, that women, too often alone, must face. We must be men enough to listen to women as equals.” Men had to challenge old attitudes and behaviours.

“For our daughters and our sisters, our mothers and our wives, we must stand and be counted now.” Our children, he said, were watching; it was time to give them a legacy based in mutual respect and opportunity under the law.

The head of the global White Ribbon Campaign, in which men in 55 countries wear white ribbons to denote their opposition to gender violence, told the audience that the challenge was for all men to examine their own attitudes towards gender-based violence.

Executive Director Todd Minerson, of Canada, recalled the roots of the campaign, started by three Toronto men on the second anniversary of the day in 1989 when a man screaming “I hate feminists” slaughtered 14 women at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique.

In the campaign’s first year, nearly 100,000 men in Canada wore the white ribbon and by 2006 more than 800,000 ribbons had been distributed.

Another panelist, Carla Del Ponte, Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, said that when the agency’s work was done, a legacy would be the condemnation of “the historical silence” surrounding wartime sexual violence.

Men who had raped and sexually enslaved women had been convicted and imprisoned, and the role of political and military authorities in tolerating and encouraging sexual violence had been acknowledged.
The lesson for all countries, said Ms Del Ponte, a Swiss national, was that courts and tribunals had to commit to addressing violence against women. In addition, she said, “we need to think creatively about making the justice process safe and comfortable for women who come forward to tell their stories. One barrier to women seeking justice is retraumatisation.”
Raghida Dergham, a journalist for the London-based Arabic daily paper Al Hayat, urged the crowd to put a human face on the issue of violence, telling the story “creatively, repeatedly, systematically. Tell it over and over again.”

“Shame us in the media to do more. We in the media do have a role in ending impunity for violence against women and girls.”

Linda Petersen, the Manager of SPC’s Human Development Programme and its Women’s Development Adviser, said that the event reinforced the need for men to not just talk about stopping violence against girls and women, but to do something about it.

“So often we hear men say we need to do something about violence,” she said, “but more often we need to see men taking responsibility. As Rev. De Graff said at the UN today, our children are watching.”

ENDS

Background notes:
International Women’s Day has a long history – and is a public holiday in 14 countries, among then Vietnam, Bulgaria and Mongolia. In these countries, the day is an occasion for men to honour the women in their lives with small gifts.
IWD emerged in 1909 from the labour movements in North America and Europe. Various major rallies and protests saw women protest poor working conditions and discrimination, and call for the right to vote and to hold public office.
The United Nations began marking IWD in 1975, International Women’s Year. The UN General Assembly cited two reasons for its decision to observe IWD: the fact that securing peace and social progress and the full enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms requires the active participation, equality and development of women; and to acknowledge the contribution of women to the strengthening of international peace and security.

Find out more at http://www.un.org/events/women/iwd/2007/index.html

The Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) is an annual event which this year ran from February 26 to March 9. CSW was set up in 1946 and is dedicated to gender equality and advancement of women. Every year, representatives of member states gather at the United Nations Headquarters in New York to evaluate progress on gender equality, identify challenges, set global standards and formulate concrete policies to promote gender equality and advancement of women.

The end result of CSW is a set of “Agreed Conclusions” on the priority theme for that year – in this 51st session, The Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination and Violence Against the Girl Child. They contain an analysis of the theme and a set of recommendations for governments, intergovernmental bodies, civil society actors and other relevant stakeholders.

Forty-five member states of the United Nations serve as members of the Commission at any one time. There is currently no Pacific representation.

Find more information at: http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/csw/index.html#about

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