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The book explores the relationship between violence against women on one hand, and the rights to health and reproductive health on the other. It argues that violation of the right to health is a consequence of violence, and that (state) health policies might be a cause of – or create the conditions for – violence against women. It significantly contributes to feminist and international human rights legal scholarship by conceptualising a new ground-breaking idea, violence against women’s health (VAWH), using the Hippocratic paradigm as the backbone of the analysis. The two dimensions of violence at the core of the book – the horizontal, ‘interpersonal’ dimension and the vertical ‘state policies’ dimension – are investigated through around 70 decisions of domestic, regional and international judicial or quasi-judicial bodies (the anamnesis). The concept of VAWH, drawn from the anamnesis, enriches the traditional concept of violence against women with a human rights-based approach to autonomy and a reflection on the pervasiveness of patterns of discrimination (diagnosis). VAWH as theorised in the book allows the reconceptualisation of states’ obligations in an innovative way, by identifying for both dimensions obligations of result, due diligence obligations, and obligations to progressively take steps (treatment). The book eventually asks whether it is not international law itself that is the ultimate cause of VAWH (prognosis).
, gender-based crimes or practices. I will argue in these pages that, compared to the idea of VAW, this new concept can be enriched by another element, the limitation of women’s autonomy, which will be construed in these pages along human rights-based lines. In the introduction, I ‘de-constructed’ the idea of VAW, analysing it from five different perspectives; in this chapter I will ‘construct’ the concept of VAWH, in an attempt to provide the clearest conceptualisation of my argument. Being a framework definition, VAWH does not include the element of intent. Nonetheless
criminalise under the Council of Europe Istanbul Convention to find confirmation of that.2 I regard denial of access to abortion, denial of access 235 DE VIDO 9781526124975 PRINT.indd 235 24/03/2020 11:02 Violence against women’s health in international law to emergency contraception, obstetric violence and involuntary sterilisation as forms of VAWH in their vertical dimension, because they are the product of policies or laws in the field of health. I also characterise the notion of VAWH as having an additional element: the limitation of women’s autonomy. This element
campaigned for the admission of women to universities, reform of the marriage laws, and for women’s suffrage. 2 While she believed in women’s autonomy, she did not believe in sexual equality. For Cobbe, women were the ‘mother sex’, whose role was caring for their family or, if unmarried, other people and creatures. She wrote an essay on ‘How a dog thinks and feels’ in which she concluded that there were more similarities than differences in mental attributes between humans and dogs. Cobbe was born in Newbridge
focuses on the horizontal, interpersonal dimension. Compared to the concept of VAW, VAWH will be capable of comprehensively grasping the two dimensions of violence affecting women’s rights to health and to reproductive health, and will add a new element to the definition: the limitation of women’s autonomy, which is absent from the notion of VAW as elaborated at the international level. The main argument has been built on the paradigm of medicine which has been known since Hippocrates: anamnesis, diagnosis, treatment and prognosis.7 The paradigm is a useful tool for
both reject ‘feminine’ characteristics imposed by men and suggest her own. For Irigaray, the task of women today is to achieve their own autonomy, to reclaim their own otherness, i.e., those aspects of women’s lives that have been denigrated, neglected or discarded as inconsequential. When women act to rectify this, they establish their virginity. For Irigaray, virginity has to do not with chastity, as for Levinas, but with women’s autonomy. It is not just a civil autonomy, however, but a form of wholeness where a woman realises a spiritual identity. ‘For me
the realm of unchanging ‘tradition’ failed to acknowledge the continuous dynamic of cultural change that adversely impacted on women’s autonomy in African gender relations; women, they conclude, lost more under colonial rule than men. 79 Gendered development discourse in practice undermined women’s role as guardians of the land and led to the commoditisation of land and
foetus would have a decent chance – a more than 15 per cent. chance, for example – of surviving outside the woman. That is why they say that there is no evidence of a significant improvement in the survival levels of pre-term infants below 24 weeks’ gestation in the past 18 years. (Hansard, 20.5.2008. Col. 251) Conversely, others stressed the importance of safeguarding women’s autonomy and the right to choose. Susan Kramer’s intervention is based upon such an approach: ‘attempts to reduce the time limit for 05_Gender_Lib_Dems_105-127 118 15/12/10 09:06 Page 118
expansion of opportunities in education and work increased women’s autonomy and independence, and single women began to be seen as more of a threat. Accordingly, the derogatory discourses emerged again, here too compounded in the early twentieth century by sexological theories which proposed the harm of celibacy, at the same time proclaiming the dangers of non-married sexual practices. hH In Britain, probably the spinster’s best moment was in the last years of the nineteenth century and the very early twentieth century – the time of the ‘new woman’. Judy Little traces
chap 10 20/7/06 130 9:47 am Page 130 Elizabeth Gaskell Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Gaskell recognised that ‘“making women better mothers”’ (Banks: 17) is not a question of intensifying devotion, but, on the contrary, of strengthening women’s autonomy to the point where they can ‘govern a family with judgment’ and ‘take care’ of their children (W: 6) in a different sense from any of Molly’s ‘stepmothers’. Mrs Hamley, the most devoted of these maternal models, would have got little sympathy from Wollstonecraft: ‘women of sensibility are the most unfit for this task