Violence against Women

Abstract

Abstract This chapter explains that there is no provision in either the Declaration (DEDAW) or Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) that explicitly addresses violence against women. Instead, States parties’ obligations with respect to the elimination of violence against women have been developed by a number of international institutional initiatives in which the CEDAW Committee has played a key role, as identified in the chapter. By requiring a holistic approach to the different manifestations of violence against women, identifying violence as discrimination against women, and thereby adopting a rights-based approach, General Recommendation No 19 on Violence against Women in 1992 was the instrument that brought violence against women unequivocally into the domain of international human rights law. In 2017, drawing upon its twenty-five years of experience of understanding violence against women as a form of discrimination, as expressed through several rounds of States’ initial and subsequent periodic reporting and more than fifteen years of individual petitions and inquiry procedures under the Optional Protocol to the Convention, the Committee updated General Recommendation No 19 in its General Recommendation No 35. This took account of both subsequent normative developments and social changes and provides States with ‘further guidance aimed at accelerating the elimination of gender-based violence against women’.