The Role of Social Movements in the Recognition of Gender Violence as a Violation of Human Rights: From Legal Reform to the Language of Rights

Manuel Calvo García

doi:10.17561/tahrj.v0i6.2930

Abstract

The history of rights shows that the struggle for the recognition of women’s rights was difficult enough and the recognition of the right of women to a life without gender violence has been even more difficult. With a perspective based in a socio-legal and critical approach, this article defends that the recognition of the right of women to a life free of gender violence must be seen as a conquest of the feminist movement and women’s organizations. It was the struggle of the feminist movement which provided the catalyst for the recognition of women’s rights and the specific right of women to a life free of gender violence and to protection against such violence. But not only the recognition, also the praxis of the right of women to a life free of gender violence is important. The right of women to a life free from gender-based violence cannot be fully realized without the implementation of this right at the international and the local level. The implementation of rights and the existence of social movements involved with the right to a life free from gender violence is decisive to transforms the demands for protection from violence and its eradication to be see not as a question of mercy, but as a question of justice; and putting the individual experiences of gender violence victims within a wider framework from which the abuse can be considered as a social problem.

Highlights

The history of rights shows that the struggle for the recognition of women’s rights was difficult enough and the recognition of the right of women to a life without gender violence has been even more difficult
This tendency resulted from the confluence of a series of factors which include, in the first place, the actions of women’s movements and defenders of women victims of abuse in favour of using criminal law to provide justice and redress the lack of consideration of the rights of women who suffer violence for reasons of gender, which turned their situation into an issue of public and political concern
In the 1980s a movement for the defence of women’s rights emerged internationally from the grassroots of civil society which articulated the slogan “women’s rights are human rights”. This bottom-up movement was involved in various activities ranging from the organisation of a defence network for the rights of women in the Philippines to the Encuentro feminista de mujeres latinoamericanas y del Caribe (Feminist Meeting of Latin American and Caribbean Women) in Bogotá (1981), which declared 25 November as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, and many other specific initiatives organised all over the world (Reilly 2009: 71)

Summary

LEGAL REFORMS AND THE STRUGGLE AGAINST GENDER VIOLENCE

Women’s organisations made a decisive contribution to putting gender violence in the public arena and to developing mechanisms for its eradication by arguing that the problems of abused women were not individual problems, but a general social problem requiring political and juridical intervention. In countries where the law is considered to be one of the principal means of reinforcing values, the actions of feminist collectives and in particular of lawyers representing battered women focussed on developing legal and regulatory instruments aimed at empowering victims of abuse, both increasing their protection and at the same time increasing the sanctions against their assailants (Kelly 2003: 70) This tendency resulted from the confluence of a series of factors which include, in the first place, the actions of women’s movements and defenders of women victims of abuse in favour of using criminal law to provide justice and redress the lack of consideration of the rights of women who suffer violence for reasons of gender, which turned their situation into an issue of public and political concern. Gender violence began to feature more prominently in the international agenda of organisations defending women’s rights and was considered both nationally and locally as a violation of those rights

II.1. The recognition of women’s rights as “human rights”

II.2. The specification of gender violence as a violation of rights