Violence Against Women

Baroness Hodgson of Abinger Excerpts

Monday 9th December 2013 Grand Committee

[Baroness Hodgson of Abinger (Con)]

I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Gould, on raising this subject for debate today, because the situation of women in conflict is so often overlooked. For most people in the UK, war is viewed through the media with images of young men—soldiers, rebels, fundamentalist groups, freedom fighters. What is hardly ever shown are the pictures of the women in these countries who die as civilians, or those who are raped violently and repeatedly as a strategy of modern warfare. Over the past century, wars have shifted from battlefields to communities, and today it is estimated that 90% of casualties are civilians, mostly women and children. In terror, women often flee, trying to take their families to a safer place, sometimes making themselves even more vulnerable.

Of the 42 million refugees and internally displaced people today, 80% are women and children. These stark figures do not reveal the suffering that lies behind them. What happens to families when a mother is killed? What about the heartbreak of leaving your home with nothing, to ensure your family’s survival? This anguish was very much brought home to me when I met Syrian refugees in Lebanon in May. Being the poorest in these countries makes women especially vulnerable in conflict, not only because they are less physically able to defend themselves but because their cultural norms and status in society often put them at particular risk. The destruction of services and infrastructure during conflict means that there is no support to turn to, and it is not just by the enemy that women will be attacked. When a conflict starts, levels of domestic violence spiral out of control.

As the noble Baroness has highlighted, women frequently become prime targets. Too often today, rape is used as a weapon of war; raping a woman in front of her family effectively disarms the men. UN special representative Zainab Bangura describes it as “History’s greatest silence”. Accurate data from conflict countries are hard to obtain but the estimates are truly terrible: 50,000 women systematically raped in the camps in Bosnia; around 400,000 women raped in Rwanda; 400,000 women raped in the DRC in the years 2006 and 2007 alone; 500,000 women raped in Colombia. One could go on—Sudan, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Cambodia, Haiti, Nicaragua, Mexico, women being gang-raped in Tahrir Square in Cairo, and it is happening right now in Syria today. In spite of this, the conviction rates up to now have been pitifully small: none after World War II, 29 in Bosnia, 11 in Rwanda and six in Sierra Leone.

I pay enormous tribute to the Foreign Secretary for his initiative to prevent sexual violence in conflict and post-conflict countries, which was launched in May 2012, and I am enormously proud to be on the steering board. There has been outstanding progress, and I am sure we will hear more on this from the Minister: 137 countries have endorsed the declaration—that is 70% of all the members of the United Nations. In the words of the Foreign Secretary:

“We want to bring the world to a point of no return, creating irreversible momentum towards ending warzone rape and sexual violence worldwide”.

In time, this will change the lives of millions across the world.

As the noble Baroness said, women are not a homogeneous group. No data exist on the millions of widows and wives of the disappeared, who are particularly vulnerable and may be targeted within their families and the wider community. According to Widows for Peace through Democracy, it is suggested that there are over 2 million widows in Iraq; more than 50% of all women in eastern Congo are widows, and there are 2.5 million in Afghanistan, with around 80,000 in Kabul alone, often having to resort to begging on the streets to support their families.

“Wherever there is conflict, women must be part of the solution”,

said Michelle Bachelet, the former head of UN Women. Women are hit hardest by war, yet it is an irony that they are excluded from national peace talks and plans. Over the past 25 years, only one in 40 peace treaty signatories have been women, and between 1990 and 2010 only 12 out of 585 peace accords referred to women’s needs in rehabilitation or reconstruction.

Failing to recognise the different experiences of women and men threatens to erode women’s rights and puts them at increased risk. For women, violence continues after the fighting stops, when there will be many armed men and usually fragile or non-existent transitional justice systems. In post-conflict countries, a culture of normalised sexual violence can continue. When I visited Liberia, we were told that girls had to engage in “transactional” sex to survive, with even the girls in the university having to exchange sex for grades.

There has been little real progress on including women at the peace table in spite of seven UN resolutions, starting with 1325 and ending with 2122, to address this, through lack of global implementation. Over the past few years, one only has to look at the way in which Afghan women have been excluded from the London Conference, the Bonn II Conference—where a woman from civil society was allowed to speak for three minutes—and the Chicago NATO summit.

You cannot have real and lasting peace without considering and including women, who are half the population, and it is certainly not peace for the women if domestic and sexual violence is raging unabated and there are no institutions to deal with this. Surely it is just as much a right for women to help to decide the future of their country and that their diverse experiences are integrated into all peacebuilding, peacemaking and reconstruction processes. When that happens, peace is more likely to last. I particularly ask the Minister to ensure that, where the UK is involved in peace negotiations, women in civil society are included.