Violence Against Women and Girls

Gavin Shuker Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2014 Westminster Hall

[Gavin Shuker (Luton South) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am grateful to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Brooke. There have been many well informed speeches today. I welcome the broad approach of the Government in making this a strategic issue in the work of the Department for International Development, but it is also right to raise some of the concerns flagged up in the Select Committee report.

Violence against women is a violation that cannot be justified by any political, religious or cultural claim. Around the world, violence against women and girls takes many grotesque forms, a lot of which have been raised in this debate. One in three women will face violence in their lifetimes: that is 1 billion women and girls—1 billion stories of violence against women. However, that is not a stagnant statistic; there are a number of situations happening now, globally, that should spur our focus on this issue.

There is the vulnerable situation faced by women and girls in the Philippines in the wake of Typhoon Haiyan. Early reports indicated that the collapse in law and order, the widespread displacement of people and the distress, disruption and sheer desperation following a disaster of that magnitude had put more than 65,000 women and girls at risk of sexual abuse and trafficking. There were the 4,000 incidents of violence against women documented in just six months by the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. Those incidents included maiming and amputation of body parts, acid attacks, kickings, beating with a wire, pulling out of hair and burning, rape, prostitution and forced abortion. That highlights the precarious situation of women on the eve of our withdrawal from Afghanistan. There is the worsening situation undoubtedly faced by women and girls in the Central African Republic, in Syria and in South Sudan as violence in those fragile states escalates.

Women and girls who experience violence suffer from a range of physical and psychological health problems. It diminishes their ability and confidence to participate in normal human activities and public life and cripples their contribution to development and peace. In doing so, violence against women impoverishes not only women, but their families, their communities and, ultimately, entire nation states.

However, at our worst, we have allowed fears of cultural insensitivity to overpower and suppress our moral obligation to stand up for women worldwide. We have allowed abusers to go unpunished for their crimes. We have allowed violence against women not to get the reckoning and retribution that it deserves and let it be removed, at times, from the international agenda. Perhaps most shockingly, we allowed it to be negotiated out of the millennium development goals. At this crucial time, we cannot and must not allow that to happen again.

The Government’s determination to tackle the collusive silence that surrounds debate on this issue is laudable, although I am concerned that on some levels that approach is flawed. The International Development Committee’s second report of this Session highlighted important ways in which we can strengthen our approach to tackling violence against women and girls.

Specifically, the report spoke of the danger of DFID’s narrow focus on reactive support services above proactive, transformative projects that deal with the underlying causes of violence. The report found that of 117 interventions listed by DFID, just 16 were aimed at changing social norms. Instead, the majority focus on building institutional capacity to respond to acts of violence—supporting survivors to access justice or the protective care and support services that they need.

The report recommended a fundamental shift in emphasis. Gender activists have supported that call, saying that they have often found it difficult, particularly at country level, to see how DFID is challenging social norms and that evidence of DFID’s much lauded and commendable “Theory of Change” being mainstreamed into key DFID programmes can sometimes be scant. In their response to the report, the Government agreed. In answer to the concerns raised, they highlighted

“ongoing efforts to deliver our commitment to help ten million women and girls access security and justice services by 2015.”

At the end of last year, DFID published another strategy entitled “Addressing Violence against Women and Girls through security and justice programming”. I acknowledge freely that it is not an either/or, but I am concerned that that invades the principal recommendation that stems from the report. Will the Minister respond to that?

Although investment in security and justice systems is a crucial building block for violence prevention, establishing accountability and redress, evidence shows that better-functioning institutions will have limited impact on the reduction of violence against women and girls unless efforts are also made to tackle the root causes of violence: women’s lack of power and discriminatory social norms.

The strategy states that one of its key objectives is to protect women and girls from all forms of violence and the threat of violence, but only seven of the 44 case studies listed across the two guidance notes make any attempt to prevent violence against women and girls; the other 37 case studies refer solely to the provision of services after violence has been committed. Moreover, it appears that we often fail to follow our own advice. The guidance asserts in bold:

“Any training or awareness raising work”—

of security and justice actors, including soldiers, occupying forces, peacekeeping forces or demobilised troops—

“must focus on improving knowledge and changing attitudes and changing behaviours.”

That is at odds with the tone used by the Prime Minister when he gave evidence to the Liaison Committee last week:

“We cannot ask our soldiers, sailors and airmen to do too many different things. They need clear instructions and a clear goal, but, yes, that can be part of it.”

The “that” is the role of UK armed forces in training overseas forces about violence against women. The guidance stresses the importance of informal provision and the role of women’s rights organisations and states that

“supporting women’s organisations and other CSOs to lobby for policy reforms and support implementation is a key priority”.

However, Womenkind Worldwide highlighted the concern that despite their enormous added value, many women’s rights organisations have not received the resources that they need to scale up their delivery and influence. They suffer from a shortage of funding that commits beyond an annual cycle. Womenkind Worldwide undertook analysis that showed that UK aid funding amounted to $16.41 million in 2011, compared with, for example, $118.6 million in the Netherlands and more in other countries. Very few southern-based women’s rights organisations are direct recipients of DFID centralised funds, and only one women’s rights organisation, Gender Links, was found to be funded under the programme partnership arrangement fund. No direct grants were found to be offering support under the civil society challenge fund.

I appreciate that we are dealing with a difficult area in which there are many competing needs, but surely there must be a shift towards tackling views among men and boys as well as protecting women and girls from violence. That is an issue not only further afield but in this country, so we should look at our views and those of others. Analysis by Amnesty International highlighted the fact that only three of 27 DFID country programmes have identified violence against women and girls as a strategic priority.

In the Government’s response to the International Development Committee’s report, much is made of the newly announced research and innovation fund, which is mentioned 12 times in the 24 pages. Although more research is welcome, I remain concerned that the research component is unlikely to be activated until later this year, and that only £25 million has been allocated, with no commitment on length, amount or protection of future funding. I am concerned that that fund may delay our response to this crucial issue. It is important that research goes hand in hand with active country programmes that challenge the perceptions of men and boys about violence against women and girls. The fund must not be treated as an omnipotent panacea. I welcome the Government’s response on those issues.

The International Development Committee’s report raises crucial questions and highlights some important ways in which we can strengthen our response. Although I stand four-square behind the Government’s approach of making the matter a strategic priority, I hope that the Minister will reflect on some of the areas of the report in which the Committee wanted DFID to do more or do things differently.