WOMEN-AFRICA: UN Launches Education Campaign Against Violence

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Aug 2 1998 (IPS) - African nations must do more to combat violence against women in their societies, U.N. officials declared at the outset of a new educational initiative focusing on gender-based violence.

“In Africa, we have a great deal of denial about the violence happening in our societies, and women and girls have suffered more from that denial than anyone else,” said Dr Nahid Toubia, president of the Research, Action and Information Network for the Bodily Integrity of Women, an African women’s rights group. “There is a defensiveness that we as Africans have against any criticism or self-criticism of our societies; I think it’s a recipe for suicide.”

“We have been denying (violence against women) in so many ways,” agreed Halima Ali, a Somali refugee now living in Boston. “Women have been raped, we have been missing our children … Violence is everywhere.”

Now, the U.N. system, led by the U.N. Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) is launching an educational campaign to warn about the various types of violence which afflict women and girls in Africa. From now until the end of the year, UNIFEM regional offices in Dakar, Harare, Lagos and Nairobi are designing a series of public events to raise awareness of the problem, UNIFEM Executive Director Noeleen Heyzer said.

The campaign, Heyzer said, intends to draw attention to five distinct types of violence against women: domestic and family- based abuse; war-related crimes; traditional practises, such as female genital mutilation; economic and political violence; and the need for state and community protection of women’s human rights.

Those broad areas include several topics which may prove to be controversial in many African countries. Thelma Awori, assistant administrator of the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) for Africa, said that a range of traditional practices that discriminate against women – including genital mutilation, ‘wife inheritance’ and other inheritance laws and practises – are abusive and should be countered.

Similarly, Awori said, there are many African nations – among them Uganda, Sudan, Liberia and Somalia – where women and girls have been or are being abducted into sexual servitude or raped on a mass scale.

Many of those countries, she contended, should also be a focus of the new initiative – as should countries where women’s non- governmental organisations have a strong presence, such as South Africa and Tanzania, she added.

The initiative also ought to take into account the AIDS crisis which has continued to sweep through African societies, Awori argued. In many countries, one out of every four people is infected by the human immuno-deficiency virus (HIV), leaving many women “sitting ducks” if their spouses or lovers refuse to wear condoms.

The risk of AIDS infection also is a type of violence – and must also be targeted by the current educational campaign, Awori said.

Since the 1993 Declaration on Violence Against Women, which called the problem both a human rights violation and a form of discrimination, and the Beijing Women’s Conference two years later, the UN system has tried to place gender-based violence on governments’ agendas.

Most recently, a UN campaign to counter violence against women in Latin America and the Caribbean gained the endorsement of 19 regional governments and non-governmental groups, noted Angela King, the UN special adviser on gender issues.

The Africa campaign, which is geared to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary this year of the UN Declaration for Human Rights, has neither specific new funding levels nor any particular countries at its focus, Heyzer acknowledged. However, she added, it is intended to include projects – such as panel discussions, television announcements and tribunals including victims of violence – that would have region-wide effect.