Despite increasing attention to gender issues in the humanitarian sector, the notion of gender equality as a humanitarian goal remains largely rejected, as some argue it would require interfering with cultural values and practices, and thus lie beyond the remit of humanitarianism. This paper questions this by examining the close relationship between certain humanitarian goals, and cultural values and practices. It ultimately calls for a gender-transformative humanitarian action that recognises and supports local feminist actors, in an effort to transform gender relations both in local communities and within humanitarianism itself.
This review examines the appropriateness of including men within the existing sexual and gender-based violence programming in armed conflict settings rather than providing services explicitly designed to address their needs. A central premise of the paper is that men experience sexual violence differently to women and that the way they seek help also varies. This gender-specific difference calls into question why humanitarian organisations pursue a ‘gender-inclusion’ approach, which simply extends services designed for women to men. There is a need to reconsider this approach, and specifically its implementation. The paper reviews relevant secondary sources and argues that current practices of sexual and gender-based violence programming fail to translate into actionable responses suited for and sensitive to men.
Sexual violence against men and boys in conflict and displacement has garnered increasing attention over the past decade and has been recognised in UN Security Resolution 2467. Despite increased evidence and understanding of the issue, myths and misconceptions nevertheless abound. The authors of this article – practitioners and academics with extensive experience in the field – aim to dispel ten of the most common misconceptions that we have encountered, and to highlight the current evidence base regarding sexual violence against men and boys in humanitarian settings. We argue that just as there is no universal experience of sexual violence for women and girls, there is no universal experience for men and boys, or for nonbinary people. In order to address the complexities of these experiences, a survivor-centred, intersectional approach is needed.
In this article we seek to extend recent debates on how the promotion of self-reliance through vocational training and entrepreneurship has become the new neoliberal mantra among refugee-supporting agencies, policymakers and humanitarian actors. More specifically, we do so in the context of corporate and celebrity-endorsed humanitarian partnerships and initiatives that single out refugee women and girls. Informed by postcolonial feminist scholarship and guided by Carol Bacchi’s ‘what is the problem represented to be’ (WPR) approach we compare IKEA’s partnership with the Jordan River Foundation (JRF) in Jordan and Angelina Jolie’s support for the RefuSHE project in Kenya. While differences between the two problem representations exist, both initiatives seek to empower refugee women by activating latent entrepreneurial abilities. These, we conclude, reinforce a saviour/saved humanitarian logic while also obscuring the gender division of responsibilities and precarious nature of artisanal labour.
In 2018, the global #MeToo movement turned its attention to the aid industry, after scandals at Oxfam and Save the Children highlighted the sexual harassment, abuse and assault prevalent in the sector. This article explores #MeToo in the context of the aid industry (informally known by many participants as #AidToo), particularly within a British context. The article argues that the aid industry exists in a historical, social and political space that is particularly volatile. The abusive behaviour of men in the sector is shaped and enabled by race, class and gender inequalities, which undermine many of the stated aims of international aid programmes. The humanitarian and development aid sector will not eradicate this behaviour until it recognises how it is enabled and encouraged by these inequalities. The article argues that the aid sector needs to develop an ethical code of conduct around sexual relationships, harassment and abuse that recognises power inequalities within the sector and seeks to protect vulnerable individuals.
Humanitarian, development and peacebuilding work has become increasingly dangerous in recent decades. The securitisation of aid has been critiqued, alongside the racialised and gendered dynamics of security provision for aid actors. What has received less attention is how a range of intersectional marginalisations – gender, racialisation, sexuality, nationality and disability – play out in constructions of security, danger and fear in aid deployments. Focusing on sexual harassment, abuse and violence as threats to safety and security, the article examines how in training and guidance for deployment to ‘the field’ (itself a problematically securitised notion), danger is projected onto sexualised and racialised ‘locals’, often overlooking the potentially far greater threat from colleagues. Here, we employ a review of security guidance, social media groups, interviews with aid staffers and reflections on our own experiences to explore how colonialist notions of security and ‘stranger danger’ play out in training. We argue that humanitarianism is still dominated by the romanticised figure of the white, male humanitarian worker – even if this problematic imaginary no longer reflects reality – and a space where those questioning exclusionary constructs of danger are quickly silenced and even ridiculed, even in the age of #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter.
The anamnesis, which in medical terms mainly consists in case history, provides a legal analysis of around 70 decisions taken by domestic and regional human rights courts, and UN treaty bodies, relevant for the two dimensions at the core of the book, the horizontal, ‘interpersonal’ dimension and the vertical, ‘state policies’ dimension. The first dimension includes cases on domestic violence, rape in peacetime and female genital mutilation. The second dimension explores cases on abortion, involuntary sterilisation, maternal health and emergency contraception. The chapter examines the decisions following three axes/questions: Who are the applicants? In which ways was women’s health relevant in the decision? What reparations, if any, were granted? The book does not aim to elaborate a database of jurisprudence but to reflect on legal issues arising from selected decisions to elaborate the concept of violence against women’s health in chapter 2.
The prognosis is the final step in Hippocratic medicine. This chapter includes some final comments on the main findings of the analysis. First, it discusses what the book has achieved and encourages the reader to view the two dimensions as intersecting, and to transfer findings in the horizontal dimension to the vertical one and vice versa. In a second part, the chapter puts the main argument of the book to the test once more, asking whether, in the end, despite all the efforts, international law itself is not the ultimate cause of violence against women’s health. The conclusions answer the question whether the law can be both the cause of and the cure for the disease.
This chapter conceptualises the innovative idea of violence against women’s health (VAWH). Like the concept of violence against women, violence against women’s health is not an autonomous idea in criminal law, but an ‘umbrella’ definition grasping two dimensions of violence, each characterised by specific, gender-based crimes or practices. The chapter first ‘constructs’ VAWH as a form of discrimination against women, of gender-based violence, a violation of the rights to health and to reproductive health, and as a concept that does not require the element of intent for its definition. In particular, it stresses the existence and the pervasiveness of patterns of discrimination (often intersectional discrimination) in the perpetration of VAWH. The chapter then distinguishes this idea from the traditional one of violence against women and enriches it to encompass limitation of women’s autonomy, construed using a human rights-based approach. In dealing with autonomy and consent, the chapter extends its reasoning to another practice, genital cosmetic surgery, which it compares to female genital mutilation.
The introduction provides the background of the research, the main argument and the methodology used throughout the book. It deconstructs the notion of violence against women as consolidated at the international level in order to grasp its main elements and explains why the choice of the rights to health and reproductive health is pivotal for the analysis. It then captures the relationship between violence against women on one hand, and the rights to health and reproductive health on the other, which constitutes the starting point of chapter 1. It argues that violation of the right to health is a consequence of violence, just as (state) health policies might be a cause of – or create the conditions for – violence against women. The chapter also illustrates the reason underlying the choice of the Hippocratic paradigm as backbone of the work and provides the structure of the following chapters.