RIGHTS: UNIFEM Funds 17 New Projects to Eliminate Gender Violence

By Thalif Deen Reprint | | Print |

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Aug 16 2000 (IPS) - The UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) has been flooded with requests for seed money to finance new projects to fight violence against women worldwide.

UNIFEM Executive Director Noeleen Heyzer says she has received close to 200 proposals this year with funding requests totalling about 12.5 million dollars.

But the UNIFEM Trust Fund, which was set up in 1996 specifically to finance projects aimed at eliminating gender violence, is able to allocate only about one million dollars for 17 projects in 21 countries.

The grants range from about 25,000 dollars to 130,000 dollars for a variety of projects in countries such as Jamaica, Jordan, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and the former Yugoslavia.

These UNIFEM-funded projects will address issues such as domestic violence, sexual harassment, sexual abuse of girls, dowry-related violence, forced prostitution and so-called “honour killings” where the victims are mostly women.

“There is an obvious and growing need for greater funding in the area of violence prevention,” says Heyzer. “But our biggest obstacle is not a lack of ideas. It is a lack of resources.”

Over the last four years, UNIFEM’s Trust Fund has awarded more than 4 million dollars to projects in 56 countries. The Fund has been specifically looking for “innovative projects” that can later serve as examples of replication in other countries.

This year, the Fund is providing about 100,000 dollars to the Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling in Jordan, for a project which will help provide a safe environment for sexually abused girls and also promote a dialogue among judges on issues such as women’s sexuality, shame, honour, sexual purity and crimes against women.

Based on indications from a previous Trust Fund project, UNIFEM says that the number of sexually abused girls who are potential victims of femicide is higher than generally thought. These girls are often reluctant to disclose their abuse and thus do not demand protection and counselling.

Through information gathered from a series of workshops in high schools, the project will identify factors which deter girls from disclosing their experiences of sexual abuse, and will develop “safe” methods for making disclosure and obtaining help.

Simultaneously, it will sensitise judges to the pains and needs of victims and to weaknesses in the legal system in prosecuting femicide cases. The project is to be implemented in the West Bank and Jordan since they have similar legal codes and are also culturally and socially similar.

The Fund is providing over 129,000 dollars to the joint International Women’s Judges Association, covering Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Zimbabwe, to help create a cadre of about 300 judicial officers and academic experts to lead interactive training sessions for judges, enabling them to make informed decisions on violence against women and discrimination.

The primary objective of the project is to enable African judges and magistrates to act as catalysts for social change in redressing human rights violations that oppress African women.

The project will also help develop a jurisprudence of equality by creating greater understanding and empathy for women victims by judges and other officers in the legal judicial system.

The Fund has also made a grant of about 28,000 dollars to the Centre for Women’s Studies in Zagreb for a project whose objective is to expose the unrecognised violations of women’s human rights within the university system. The project will also raise awareness of the issue of sexual harassment and discover ways to encourage female students and professors to speak up about incidents of sexual harassment and gender-based violence.

UNIFEM, in partnership with several UN agencies, governments and thousands of media and NGOs, has led a series of campaigns against gender violence in Africa, Asia and the Pacific, and Latin America and the Caribbean.

Alarmed by a dramatic rise in gender violence, the United Nations has designated Nov. 25 International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.

UNIFEM says that a quarter of all women worldwide are raped during their life time. Rape has also devastated women, girls and families in recent conflicts in Rwanda, Cambodia, Liberia, Peru, Somalia, Uganda and the former Yugoslavia.

And depending on the country, says UNIFEM, between 25 percent and 75 percent of women are regularly beaten at home, while more than 120 million women have undergone genital mutilation.

“We need to say: ‘No more, and never again,”‘ says Heyzer. “If we commit ourselves to creating a world free of violence against women and girls, our children will say we stopped the most universal and unpunished crime of all time against half the people of the earth.”