Preventing Violence Against Women and Gender Inequality in Peacekeeping - Sample Pages

Preventing Violence Against Women and Gender Inequality in Peacekeeping

c o u r s e au t h o r

AnnJanette Rosga, Ph.D. i n a s s o c i at i o n w i t h

Megan Bastick and Anja Ebnรถther Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF) S e r i e s e d i to r

Harvey J. Langholtz, Ph.D.

Preventing Violence Against Women and Gender Inequality in Peacekeeping

c o u r s e au t h o r

AnnJanette Rosga, Ph.D. i n a s s o c i at i o n w i t h

Megan Bastick and Anja Ebnรถther Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF) S e r i e s e d i to r

Harvey J. Langholtz, Ph.D.

Preventing Violence Against Women and Gender Inequality in Peacekeeping Foreword. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Preface. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xii Method of Study. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii LESSON 1: INTRODUCTION TO SCR 1325 AND THE PARADOX OF. THE “WOMEN = PEACE” EQUATION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 1.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 1.2 Scope and Roots of Violence Against Women . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 1.3 Women, Peace, and the History of SCR 1325 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 © 2010 Peace Operations Training Institute. All rights reserved.

Peace Operations Training Institute 1309 Jamestown Road, Suite 202 Williamsburg, VA 23185 USA www.peaceopstraining.org

1.4 The Paradox of Identity (or the Trouble with Suggesting Women = Peace). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 1.5 Implementing SCR 1325. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 1.6 Conclusion: Re-Thinking what “Gender Mainstreaming” and SCR 1325 Require. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

First edition: March 2010 Cover: UN Photo #149571 by Fred Noy

LESSON 2: GENDER: DEFINITIONS AND THEORIES . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

The material contained herein does not necessarily reflect the views of the Peace Operations Training Institute (POTI), the Course Author(s), or any United Nations organs or affiliated organizations. The Peace Operations Training Institute is an international not-for-profit NGO registered as a 501(c)(3) with the Internal Revenue Service of the United States of America.

The Peace Operations Training Institute is a separate legal entity from the United Nations. Although every effort has been made to verify the contents of this course, the Peace Operations Training Institute and the Course Author(s) disclaim any and all responsibility for facts and opinions contained in the text, which have been assimilated largely from open media and other independent sources. This course was written to be a pedagogical and teaching document, consistent with existing UN policy and doctrine, but this course does not establish or promulgate doctrine. Only officially vetted and approved UN documents may establish or promulgate UN policy or doctrine. Information with diametrically opposing views is sometimes provided on given topics, in order to stimulate scholarly interest, and is in keeping with the norms of pure and free academic pursuit.

2.2 Which are You? Woman? Man? Neither? Both?

When Did You First Know and How? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

2.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

2.3 Differences between “Sex” and “Gender” and Some Other Key Terms. . . 43 2.4

“Policing” Sex/Gender: How Sex-Gender Relations Persist . . . . . . . . . . . 48

2.5 How Claims of “Difference” are Related to Inequality and Violence . . . . . 50 2.6 Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54

LESSON 3: INEQUALITY: DISTINCTION VERSUS DISCRIMINATION –.

WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

LESSON 7: SEXUAL VIOLENCE AND EXPLOITATION. . . . . . . . . . . . 137

3.1 Introduction: When is Sex Relevant?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 3.2 Distinction versus Discrimination. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62

7.2

3.3 Equality versus Sameness: “The Dilemma of Difference”. . . . . . . . . . . . . 64

7.3 Defining Sexual Violence, Exploitation and Abuse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144

3.4 Respecting Local Tradition versus Promoting Gender Equality: When Values Seem to Conflict . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

7.4 Some Types of Sexual Violence, Exploitation and Abuse. . . . . . . . . . . . 147

3.5 Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73

7.6 Conditions in which Sexual Violence and Exploitation are Most

Likely to Occur. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156

LESSON 4: VIOLENCE: DEFINITIONS AND THEORIES. . . . . . . . . . . . 77

7.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139

7.5

Background to the Problem of Sexual Exploitation and Abuse

by UN Peacekeepers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140

Prevalence of Sexual Violence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154

4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79

7.7 Consequences and Effects of Sexual Violence in a Post-Conflict Environment. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163

4.2 Defining Violence: Why Definitions of Violence that go Beyond

the Obvious are Important. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79

7.8

4.3 Explaining Violence: Definitions and Causes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81

LESSON 8: INSTITUTIONAL VIOLENCE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171

4.4 Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

8.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173

LESSON 5: culture versus rights?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 5.1 Introduction: Cultural Relativism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 5.2 When is a Cultural Practice “Violent”?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 5.3 When is a Violent Practice “Cultural”?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 5.4 Cultural Rights, “the West” and “the Rest”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 5.5 Cultural Relativism’s Limits: The Ethics and Politics of Intervention. . . . 110 5.6 Conclusion: Applying These Lessons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112

Preventing and Avoiding Sexual Violence. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164

8.2

“Gendercidal” Institutions Against Women and Girls. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173

8.3

Gender-Based Violence and Poverty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180

8.4

Vulnerability of Women Migrant Workers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184

8.5 Women and HIV/AIDS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185 8.6 Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189

LESSON 9: VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN IN CONFLICT. AND CRISIS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193 9.1 Introduction: Conflict and Crisis Increase Vulnerability. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195

LESSON 6: women’s rights are human rights. . . . . . . . . . . . 117

9.2 Sexual Violence in Conflict . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195

6.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119

9.3 Refugee and Internally Displaced Women . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196

6.2 Different Feminist Approaches to Violence Against Women and Women’s Human Rights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119

9.4 Changing Gender Roles in Situations of Armed Conflict. . . . . . . . . . . . . 200

6.3 History of Violence Against Women in International Human Rights . . . . 123 6.4 Ending Impunity for Crimes of Sexual Violence During Armed Conflict. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130 6.5 Conclusion: Old and New Challenges. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132

9.5 Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration Processes. . . . . . . . . 203 9.6

Violence Against Women in Post-Conflict Settings. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211

LESSON 10: women building peace. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215

Foreword

10.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217 10.2

Getting to Peace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218

10.3

Peacebuilding, Sustaining Peace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219

10.4 Women and Security. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225 10.5

Gender Mainstreaming of Peace Support Operations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227

Appendix A: List of Acronyms. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234 Appendix B: List of UN PeackeeepingOperations. . . . . . . . 236 Appendix C: Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000). . . . 239 Appendix D: Secretary-general's bulletin on. sexual exploitation and abuse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243 Appendix E: Secretary-General’s Bulletin on .

the Prohibition of Sexual Harassment . . . . . . . . . . . 246 End-of-Course Exam Instructions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255 About the Authors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 256

To view a video introduction of this lesson by course author AnnJanette Rosga, you can either log in to your virtual classroom, go to w w w. p e a c e o p s t r a i n i n g . o r g / u s e r s / m e d i a _ page/391/, or use your mobile device to scan the QR code to the left.

I would like to express my sincere thanks to Dr. AnnJanette Rosga, Megan Bastick and Anja Ebnöther, for this Peace Operations Training Institute course Preventing Violence Against Women and Gender Inequality in Peacekeeping. This course is based on the book Women in an Insecure World: Violence against women – facts, figures and analysis, edited by Marie Vlachová and Lea Biason and originally published in 2005 by the Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF).

In history’s quest for social justice and equality, certainly the struggle of women world-wide to secure the same freedoms as men has taken its place as a movement that, on the one hand, has come a long way but, on the other hand, is a long way from completion. It is only during the past 100 years that most nations have recognized women’s right to vote. Although women have won many legal battles at the national level – and been elected to positions of national leadership on almost every continent – the fact remains that world-wide millions of women still find themselves receiving unequal treatment in terms of education, opportunity, legal standing, and security.

Since its founding in 1945, the United Nations has stood for a recognition of the equality of all people.

These words are enshrined in the Preamble to the Charter of the United Nations, declaring “We the peoples of the United Nations determined…to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small…”

And yet, in 2002 the sad reality came to be known that UN peacekeepers on one mission had used their positions of trust and authority to exploit the very individuals they were assigned to protect. While this may (or may not) have been a small number of cases, the situation was immediately recognized as completely unacceptable, with swift and effective changes required to ensure that future such violations of trust and duty would not occur.

This course begins with the point that at the outset there must be a fundamental rejection of the ideology that the exploitation of women (or anyone else) is acceptable. It is not sufficient to simply promulgate regulations prohibiting sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA), but rather there must first be a greater awareness of those remaining and pervasive areas where women are still exploited. This may sound like a reasonable proposition, but the challenge here is in understanding how various cultures – including one’s own culture – still retain vestiges of customs or practices that have discriminated, and continue to discriminate, against women.

We have tried very hard in the writing of this course to balance the need to have an honest and transparent examination of the issues world-wide, with the need to not pass judgment on any nation, culture, or religion. This is not easy to do. One can quickly fall into the trap of feeling that one’s own customs are valid, while the customs of others should be open to criticism. In order to achieve this objective balance between the need to discuss discrimination against women with the need to respect national sovereignty and culture, we have taken the following steps. We have tried to cover both progress and the need for more progress in all regions – north and south, east and west, developed and developing, large and small. We have been thorough in footnoting and documentation, in most cases using UN studies and documents as the references. We have in many cases not indicated the name of the nation where specific examples are cited, but we have instead referred sometimes only to regions or continents.

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Preface The prevention of violence against women is both a necessary and difficult topic. We have not shied away from discussing this problem and trying to contribute to awareness and therefore a solution in some small way. If the student finds some sections of this course to be troubling, on the one hand we apologize for that. But on the other hand, we recognize that this course covers a troubling topic that needs to be addressed. And of course we all recognize that peacekeepers have the potential to act as positive role models and leaders in their own communities and those they work in, in preventing violence against women.

Harvey J. Langholtz, Ph.D. Executive Director Peace Operations Training Institute

The Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF) promotes good governance and reform of the security sector. The Centre conducts research on good practices, encourages the development of appropriate norms at the national and international levels, makes policy recommendations, and provides in-country advice and assistance programmes. In its work, DCAF is confronted by the reality that women and men do not enjoy security and safety equally. Moreover, violence against women impedes the creation of a well-functioning security sector, one that provides security for all citizens and is open to the participation of all citizens. It is thus critical to look at security sector reform and governance from a gender perspective, and to recognize and understand the relationships between gender, security and inequality.

In 2005, DCAF published the book Women in an Insecure World, a comprehensive study on violence against women in daily life, during armed conflict, and in post-conflict situations. Women in an Insecure World maps the pervasiveness of violence against women, analyses strategies to prevent and punish that violence, and highlights the key roles that women play in peace processes and operations. Women in an Insecure World is a basis for DCAF’s continuing work to provide security sector personnel and institutions with the knowledge and the tools to effectively address gender-based violence and discrimination.1 This course aims to assist peacekeeping personnel to promote the human rights and security of women and girls. It does so through lessons emphasizing the nature and scope of violence against women and girls around the globe, the connections between gender inequality and violence in both public and domestic spaces, and on interpersonal, community, national, regional, and international levels. Other lessons cover women’s rights as human rights and the international United Nations mandate to involve women in key roles within peacemaking and peace-building processes at every stage and every level of authority. Some of the factual information in the course is drawn and/or adapted from DCAF’s text Women in an Insecure World. Interested readers may consult that original text for a more comprehensive review of DCAF’s research on this topic.

AnnJanette Rosga, Ph.D. The Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF)

1 M Vlachová and L Biason (eds.), Women in an Insecure World: Violence against women – facts, figures and analysis, Geneva, 2005, ISBN 92-9222-028-4. The book is available from DCAF via www.dcaf.ch.

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P E A C E O P E R A TIONS T R A INING INSTIT U T E

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Introduction

Method of Study The following are suggestions for how to proceed with this course. Though the student may have alternate approaches that are effective, the following hints have worked for many.

Purpose and Scope This course adopts a global perspective, because violence against women and gender inequality are problems in every part of the world. While it includes peacekeeping contexts, the course examines violence and inequality beyond the boundaries of these contexts, since violence and discrimination in conflict and in non-conflict situations are intrinsically linked.

Several definitions and theories of sex, gender, inequality, and violence are reviewed. Emphasis is placed on theories that illuminate how relations of gender inequality are related to violence. Though the focus of the course is on violence against women, gender-specific violence that men face is also discussed.

The course sets out the international legal framework that recognizes and seeks to redress gender inequality. It highlights the active roles that women play in fighting for human rights, and in building peace and security, and how men can be partners in ending violence against women. Lessons explain how the worldwide epidemic of violence against women has forced the international community to rethink traditional boundaries between domestic and public realms. They demonstrate how creative new ways of thinking emerge – about the law, conflict, security, and peace-building – when women’s experiences are placed in the centre of analysis.

Approach This breaking down of traditional lines between what is “public” or “political,” and “personal,” “domestic,” or “private,” extends to some of the course content as well. Some lesson exercises invite students to consider ways in which their own personal and professional lives may be entwined as gendered peacekeepers. Readings and case studies provide examples to assist peacekeeping personnel with considering how they can, both personally and professionally, work to promote gender equality and to change the attitudes and behaviours that perpetuate violence.

Gender inequality and violence against women affect the lives of every person, regardless of age or gender. Gender inequality and violence against women have an enormous social cost, negatively affecting families and whole communities. Men and women must be partners in the social change necessary to address these problems. Furthermore, to understand gender inequality is to understand one of the central dynamics fuelling many kinds of violence. Even peacekeeping personnel with no particular interest in violence against women will benefit from what this course has to offer in lessons about the gendered elements of violence, including violence which is not obviously “gender-based.”

• Before you begin actual studies, first browse through the overall course material. Notice the lesson outlines, which give you an idea of what will be involved as you proceed.

• The material should be logical and straightforward. Instead of memorizing individual details, strive to understand concepts and overall perspectives in regard to the United Nations system.

• Set up guidelines regarding how you want to schedule your time.

• Study the lesson content and the learning objectives. At the beginning of each lesson, orient yourself to the main points. If you are able to, read the material twice to ensure maximum understanding and retention, and let time elapse between readings.

• When you finish a lesson, take the End-of-Lesson Quiz. For any error, go back to the lesson section and re-read it. Before you go on, be aware of the discrepancy in your understanding that led to the error.

• After you complete all of the lessons, take time to review the main points of each lesson. Then, while the material is fresh in your mind, take the End-of-Course Examination in one sitting.

• Your exam will be scored, and if you acheive a passing grade of 75 per cent or higher, you will be awarded a Certificate of Completion. If you score below 75 per cent, you will be given one opportunity to take a second version of the End-of-Course Examination.

• One note about spelling is in order. This course was written in English as it is used in the United Kingdom.

Key features of your course classroom: • Access to all of your courses; • A secure testing environment in which to complete your training;

• Access to additional training resources, including Multimedia course supplements;

• The ability to download your Certificate of

Completion for any completed course; and

• Student fora where you can communicate with other students about any number of subjects.

Access your course classroom here: http://www.peaceopstraining.org/users/user_login

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P E A C E O P E R A TIONS T R A INING INSTIT U T E

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LESSON 1 INTRODUCTION TO SCR 1325 AND THE PARADOX OF THE “WOMEN = PEACE” EQUATION

1.1

Lesson 1

LESSON OBJECTIVES 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Scope and Roots of Violence Against Women 1.3 Women, Peace, and the History of SCR 1325 1.4 The Paradox of Identity (or the Trouble with Suggesting Women = Peace)

By the end of Lesson 1, the student should be able to:

• Identify the three main components of Security Council resolution 1325; • Explain the arguments that women’s rights advocates have made about how gender inequality, development, and issues of peace and conflict are related to one another;

• Define and explain the paradox of identity; and • Identify the main approaches to gender mainstreaming that have been

taken in UN peacekeeping missions, and identify at least one suggested guideline that might further improve these approaches.

Introduction

The end of the Cold War has seen the United Nations move increasingly from traditional peacekeeping operations in conflict-ridden societies to what are known as multidimensional peace support operations (PSOs). Traditional peacekeeping operations include the monitoring of existing ceasefires, humanitarian aid deliveries, and more interventionist “peace enforcement” missions that compel warring parties to negotiate or stop fighting. In contrast, multidimensional PSOs involve extensive engagement with many sectors of a reconstructing society (legal and judicial affairs, political and civilian administration, human rights and humanitarian aid, etc.) in order to help its citizens develop the capacity to build sustainable peace in the aftermath of war.1 This transition from peacekeeping to multidimensional PSOs has required the United Nations to do more than simply replace portions of its primarily military forces with more civilian personnel (such as police, experts in human rights, gender, child protection, and political and civil affairs). It has entailed a long and still-ongoing process of institutional reform aimed at identifying the differences between a “peacekeeping” and a “peacebuilding” orientation, and at improving the organization’s performance in its peacebuilding functions. Peacebuilding, therefore, requires competency in a variety of complex activities, including: [E]nsuring the daily security of citizens; the establishment of effective reconciliation and justice processes; the reintegration of fighters back into society; the return and resettlement of displaced persons; economic reconstruction and development; the creation of an effectively functioning political system; the creation of police, military, and judicial systems that support the rule of law; support for the reinvigoration of civil society; reform of land and property ownership laws; and the transformation of

1.5 Implementing SCR 1325 1.6 Conclusion: Re-Thinking What “Gender Mainstreaming” and SCR 1325 Require

To view a video introduction of this lesson by the course author AnnJanette Rosga, you can either log in to your virtual classroom, go to www. peaceopstraining.org/users/media_page/392/, or use your mobile device to scan the QR code to the left.

1 William J. Durch, “Keeping the Peace: Politics and Lessons of the 1990s,” in UN Peacekeeping, American Politics and the Uncivil Wars of the 1990s, ed. William J. Durch. (New York: St. Martin’s Press: 1996): 1-34.

cultures themselves, including the norms and beliefs about roles of men and women in society.2 The recognition of the fact that “roughly half of all countries that emerge from conflict lapse back into violence within five years” has led to a corresponding recognition that long-term, effective peacebuilding requires more than simply “keeping warring parties from shooting at each other.”3 In many cases, much more extensive peace support assistance is required. Where violence against women is widespread, and where extreme gender inequalities are accepted features of daily life, sustainable peace may require fundamental cultural change.

As one of many larger efforts to improve the United Nations’ peacebuilding capacities, the UN Security Council in 2000 adopted resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security (hereinafter SCR 1325). SCR 1325 has three key components:

• It expresses in the strongest possible terms

the UN’s official recognition and concern that armed conflicts increasingly target, and disproportionately impact, civilians – especially women and children. And, it identifies the significance of this fact for the sustainability of peace and reconciliation efforts worldwide.

• It “reaffirms...the need to implement a fully

international humanitarian and human rights law that protects the rights of women and girls during and after conflicts.”

• It emphasizes the need to ensure that women

have full and equal participation at every level of decision-making in peace and securityrelated matters, and specifically describes the “need to mainstream a gender perspective into peacekeeping operations” as “urgent.” 4

2 Gina Torry, ed. Security Council Resolution 1325 On Women, Peace and Security -- Six Years On Report. New York: NGO Working Group on Women, Peace and Security. October 2006: viii; emphasis added.

3 Ibid., pp. viii-ix.

4 United Nations Security Council resolution 1325 on women, peace and security. S/RES/1325 (2000). See Appendix C for the full text.

l e s s o n 1 : I N T R O D U C T I ON T O S e curit y C o u n ci l R e s o l uti o n 1 3 2 5

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SCR 1325 also refers to a press statement by the Security Council president on 8 March 2000 which stresses that “peace is inextricably linked with equality between women and men,” and which calls for “specialized training for all peacekeeping personnel on the protection, special needs and human rights of women and children in conflict situations.”5

discrimination against women, and their situation of relative inequality in relation to men, cannot be significantly changed without addressing the patterns of violence against them in both public and private spheres.

As this course will detail (especially in Lesson 6), this basic argument has been laid out and endorsed by the world’s major international human rights organizations and by the Member States of the United Nations through their ratification of various conventions and treaties.6 Lessons in this course will define the following terms and explain these claims:

• Gender-based violence enforces, maintains, and can itself be a form of gender inequality.

• Gender inequality justifies and legitimates gender-based violence.

Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information, Shashi Tharoor poses for a group photo with the panelists in the discussion on “Ending impunity for violence against women and girls” in commemoration of International Women’s Day, UNHQ. (UN Photo #140475 by Devra Berkowitz, March 2007)

This course should be seen as one among many efforts by UN agencies and affiliated organizations to answer this call for specialized training related to SCR 1325. In particular, this course is concerned with:

• The complex relationships between gender

inequality and violence – especially violence against women – around the world today; and

• The international legal and political frameworks

that have developed over the past thirty years or so to address the fact that, in most areas of the world, women generally do not share equal decision-making power and access to resources with men.

The central argument of this course is that the problem of violence against women cannot be solved without remedying the global pattern of women’s lesser power and control over resources in relation to men. The same is true in reverse: 5 Security Council statement to the press, 8 March 2000: http://www.un.org/News/Press/ docs/2000/20000308.sc6816.doc.html

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The remainder of this lesson will first, briefly introduce the scope and roots of violence against women worldwide. Second, it will detail the history of UN Security Council resolution 1325, a landmark commitment by UN member states to the increased inclusion of women in all levels and aspects of international peacekeeping and peacebuilding operations. This section of the lesson places SCR 1325 into the historical context of women’s peace and human rights activism throughout the twentieth century, and it describes the changing conceptions of women over time within the UN. Specifically, it discusses the persistent tension between representing women as especially vulnerable victims of male violence on one hand, and on the other hand, as active, independent, and powerful agents of change, capable of participating in global political affairs on their own behalf. The section goes on to describe how this tension has manifested in international women’s human rights, and the struggle to combat violence against women.

6 “The human rights of women and of the girl-child are an inalienable, integral and indivisible part of universal human rights. The full and equal participation of women in political, civil, economic, social and cultural life, at the national, regional and international levels, and the eradication of all forms of discrimination on grounds of sex, are priority objectives of the international community.” (Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, World Conference on Human Rights, 1993). {WIW 235}

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The next section of the lesson, “The Paradox of Identity,” describes a dilemma that confronts the entire course: the problem of generalizing about women worldwide when no two individual women are exactly alike, let alone women from different age, culture, class, religious, ethnic, racial, sexual, regional, linguistic, and other identity groups around the world. The course opens with a discussion of this dilemma, not in order to solve it – for it is unfortunately insoluble – but in order to call the readers’ attention to certain issues the dilemma will inevitably raise throughout the remainder of the course.

The lesson then resumes the discussion of SCR 1325, with attention to its current means of implementation. This section examines how gender perspectives are presently incorporated into peace support operations via “gender mainstreaming” and the use of “gender focal points” and “gender experts,” and it defines these terms. The lesson concludes with some suggestions for how “gender mainstreaming” and the implementation of SCR 1325 might productively be improved.

It offers supplementary guidelines for possible consideration in peace support operations.

1.2 Scope and Roots of Violence Against Women Scope Within the last 15 years, through several documents described in more detail in Lesson 6, the international community has made increasingly clear statements defining violence against women, and describing the scope of this violence. The nations of the world have acknowledged that women are vulnerable to violence that may be physical, sexual or psychological, perpetrated in private spaces (such as in the home), or in public settings (including places of work and educational institutions). It has also noted that the state can sometimes legitimize such violence, whether actively (with laws that permit rape in marriage, or with violent penalties against women for crimes that are perceived to harm male “honour,” for instance) or through inaction (by failing to punish domestic violence or perpetuating ideas that men are more valuable than women).

There is now international recognition of the fact that women’s fight for survival begins at a very early stage in the life cycle. This can be seen in the mortality rate of girls aged 1-4 years, which in some places is much higher than for boys of the same age group. There are countries in which

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girls are systematically starved, denied medical care, and neglected by their families because of a cultural preference for boys. In some regions, this is likely to be a significant causal factor behind demographic imbalances between men and women.

Available statistics suggest that domestic violence is the most common form of violence against women worldwide. For example, in the United States it is estimated that one in four college women is a victim of domestic violence.7 In some Asian countries, thousands of women are reportedly victims of homicide by family members.

In one Latin American country, more than half of reported crimes are of women beaten by their spouses.

Women and girls are also especially vulnerable to sexual violence – to which they are very frequently exposed in the “safety” of their homes.

For example, a 1988 study of a Nigerian Treatment Centre indicated that 15% of female patients with sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) were under the age of five. In the same sample, 6% were between the ages of six and fifteen years. Similarly, a study at the Maternity Hospital of Lima, Peru, indicated that 90% of young mothers aged 12-16 became pregnant through rape and that a majority of these girls had been victimized by a close male relative. In a study carried out in Costa Rica, 95% of pregnant girls under fifteen were victims of incest.8 Following sexual assault, girls may face further victimization at home and in their communities.

They are often morally condemned by communities if local cultural or religious expectations place responsibility on females for their own victimization.

In many societies, greater value is placed on girls who remain virgins, as they are considered to be worth more in marriage exchanges. The choices open to girls in these situations are limited, so they become easy targets for further exploitation through prostitution, slavery, child labour, and trafficking.

7 One in Four, http://www.oneinfourusa.org/index.php.

8 Vlachová and Biason, Women in an Insecure World, 6. The Interactive Population Centre, Forms of Gender-based Violence and their Consequences (UNFPA, March 1999), at http://www.unfpa.org/ intercenter/violence/intro.htm.

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All through life, girls and women continue to face the risk of violence directed at them because of their gender. In workplaces, women face other forms of abuse and discrimination ranging from sexual harassment and unequal pay to poor maternity benefits, all of which increase their vulnerability to poverty and thus to conditions in which they may be more likely to suffer violence and/or ill health.

Armed conflict, particularly within states, has perhaps drawn the greatest attention to the issue of gender-based violence in recent years. Although the victimization of women in armed conflict has increased in recent times, so has women’s participation in wars as part of armed forces or groups. For example, in revolutionary warfare or counter-insurgencies, which have occurred largely in the Southern Hemisphere, women have increasingly served as part of armed forces, although in some cases this has resulted from coercion.

In some conflicts, armed groups target women and girls for victimization as a calculated policy in their efforts to destabilize society and gain political, military or economic advantages. Some of the most shocking manifestations of this were seen in the conflicts in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.9 Rape of women aimed at purposely infecting them with HIV/AIDS has recently added another deadly dimension to this form of war crime.10 Even when deliberate infection has not been the goal, it is often a consequence of rape. There has been a notable increase in HIV/AIDS infection along the corridors of armed conflict – one of the net effects of using rape as a weapon of war.

9 UNFPA, Sexual Violence Against Women and Girls in War and Its Aftermath: Realities, Responses, and Required Resources, Briefing Paper Prepared for Symposium on Sexual Violence in Conflict and Beyond (21-23 June 2006, Brussels, Belgium): 4. See also Human Rights Watch, Women and Armed Conflict; International Justice, at http://www.hrw.org/women/conflict.html.

10 In a survey conducted by AVEGA, the Association of Genocide Widows, out of 1,125 women survivors of rape during the Rwandan genocide, 70% are HIV-positive. See: UNIFEM, Facts & Figures on HIV/AIDS, at http://www.unifem. org/gender_issues/hiv_aids/facts_figures.php#16 and http://www.avega.org.rw/.

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Women and girls fleeing armed conflict form a majority of the world’s refugees and internally displaced persons. Living in these insecure conditions makes them more vulnerable to sexual harassment and assault. Even some of their supposed protectors – peacekeepers and aid workers – have at times become their victimizers (see Lesson 9).

Another by-product of armed conflict is the trafficking of human beings for use as labourers, for forced prostitution, or as slaves. In some regions, the trafficking of boys and girls for use as soldiers has been a prominent phenomenon.11 This has occurred in, for example, the Mano River area of Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, and the Great Lakes Region of Africa.12 Roots Do the roots of violence against women lie in inherently violent men and inherently peace-loving women? Traditional explanations for gender-based violence often place the responsibility with men, who disproportionately control political institutions with the power to build militaries and wage war.

Thus, it is not uncommon to see claims that wars are started by men who are “naturally aggressive” and who work in male dominated systems.

11 Report of the Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences, Ms. Radhika Coomaraswamy, on trafficking in women, women’s migration and violence against women, submitted in accordance with Commission on Human Rights resolution 1997/44, E/CN.4/2000/68 (29 February 2000), at http://www.unhchr.ch/ Huridocda/Huridoca.nsf/0/e29d45a105cd81438025 68be0051fcfb/$FILE/G0011334.pdf; Human Rights Watch, Uganda: Child Abductions Skyrocket in North, (Geneva, March 28, 2003), at http://hrw.org/ english/docs/2003/03/28/uganda5451.htm.

12 Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) GmbH, Armed Conflict and Trafficking in Women, Desk Study, (Eschborn, 2004): 13, at http://www2.gtz.de/dokumente/ bib/04-5304.pdf. UNFPA, Sexual Violence Against Women and Girls in War and Its Aftermath, 5.

Thanh-Dam Truong and Maria Belen Angeles, Searching for Best Practices to Counter Human Trafficking in Africa: A Focus on Women and Children, Report Commissioned by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, (March 2005), at http://unesdoc.unesco.org/ images/0013/001384/138447e.pdf.

Accompanying such claims are their counterparts: women are “peace-loving”; they abhor violence and do not seek to conquer others.

Even those who do not believe that tendencies toward aggression or peacefulness are biologically based or inherent in the sexes may still argue that, for cultural reasons (because of how men and women are raised differently), it is men who militarize society and women who have the best potential to bring the world to peace. As will be seen in the section below, those who advocate greater participation of women in peace processes and governance generally have this as their underlying assumption; they argue that women in positions of political power are less likely to choose militaristic problem-solving strategies than are men, and that there would be less violence and fewer wars if more women were in charge.

1.3 Women, Peace, and the History of SCR 1325 The notion that women are less violent and aggressive than men, and therefore more interested in, and good at, peacebuilding, is strong in the traditions of many cultures. Women may be seen as gentler, more empathic and compassionate, whether by virtue of gender socialization processes, biological traits like their capacity to bear children, or cultural ones like the related likelihood that they will take a greater role in raising those children. In the Euro-American context, associations between women and peacefulness became particularly widespread in the post-industrialization era as new class and family formations developed in which men worked for wages away from home, while middle and upper class women stayed at home. In part to resist the image of women as mere bearers of children (with no role to play in the public life of governance and politics), some variants of Euro-American feminism embraced the positive aspects of the stereotype of “women as peaceful” as a way to advocate for increasing women’s voices in public affairs (such as the right to vote).

One influential example of this comes from a 1938 book called Three Guineas by the famous British novelist and peace activist, Virginia Woolf.

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Three Guineas is a manifesto against patriarchy,13 nationalism, and war, three societal evils that Woolf believed were interconnected and dependent upon one another: Our country...throughout the greater part of its history has treated me as a slave; it has denied me education or any share in its possessions.

Our country still ceases to be mine if I marry a foreigner. Our country denies me the means of protecting myself, forces me to pay a very large sum annually to protect me, and is so little able, even so, to protect me that air raid precautions are written on the wall. Therefore, if you insist on fighting to protect me, or our country, let it be understood, soberly and rationally between us, that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits which I have not shared and probably will not share; but not to gratify my instincts, or to protect myself or my country. For...in fact, as a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country, as a woman, my country is the whole world.14 [We women] can best help you [men] prevent war by not repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods. We can best help you to prevent war by not joining your society [for the prevention of war] but by remaining outside your society but in co-operation with its aim.15 In other words, Woolf thought that ideas of male superiority over women were connected to early twentieth-century nationalist ideologies of superiority over other nations, as well as to the notion that expending vast amounts of wealth and countless human lives in military combat could solve international problems.

13 Any social or political system in which, for the most part, men hold power and women are largely excluded from it.

14 Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (New York: Harvest/HJB Books, 1938): p. 108.

15 Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (2nd printing, 1966): p. 143. (Quoted in Dianne Otto, “A Sign of ‘Weakness’? Disrupting Gender Certainties in the Implementation of Security Council Resolution 1325.” Michigan Journal of Gender and Law, Vol. 13 (2006), pp. 1-2 of typescript copy.)

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Not least, the ideal has been a strong motivating force in the history leading up to the adoption of United Nations Security Council resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security.

Male superiority over women

Nationalist ideologies

Military problemsolving strategies

Woolf’s Thesis in Three Guineas

Woolf was not alone. For centuries, women have had a significant presence in both pacifist and anti-war movements, even when the wars they opposed were widely considered holy, as in the Middle Ages.16 More recently, the early twentieth century saw some of the largest non-violent protests against militarism, racism, colonialism, capitalism, and sexism the world has seen. Although largely forgotten by subsequent generations, there were enormous peace protests against World War I.17 In this, as in virtually all anti-war movements, women have been prominent leaders and participants. In the very midst of the First World War, two thousand women held an anti-war conference at The Hague in 1915. The still-active Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) was created as a result of this gathering.

Woolf claims that men fight to “gratify a sex instinct” that women “do not share,” and that as a result, women are capable of preventing war by “remaining outside” of men’s society. “Finding new words and creating new methods” is an idea that many people, both women and men, find persuasive. In many ways, it is an idea that is hard to refute, given the predominance of men in armed conflicts and violent crime. This course will at various points attempt to challenge such broad generalizations. Nonetheless, the ideal Woolf describes of women’s special capacity to prevent war is one that has inspired a great deal of activism on the part of women against violence worldwide.

16 Public Opinion and Crusade Propaganda (Amsterdam: N.V. Swets & Zeitlinger, 1940).

17 In the U.S. alone, “there was a large protest movement against entrance into the war, leading Congress to pass punitive legislation for antiwar statements (2,000 people were prosecuted for criticizing the war). ...Ultimately, over 330,000 men were classified as draft evaders.” (Howard Zinn, Passionate Declarations: Essays on War and Justice. Perennial/Harper Collins: 2003. 43-44.)

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UN Security Council Resolution 1325 On 31 October 2000, the Security Council unanimously adopted the landmark resolution 1325, which, as noted above, calls for the active participation of women in processes of peacemaking and peacebuilding worldwide. To repeat its central points, the resolution takes note of the particular impacts of conflict on women; it also urges governments to include women in peace processes. Most recently, this has occurred in Afghanistan, Iraq, Sierra Leone, and Sri Lanka. According to SCR 1325, Member States, UN agencies, and others must act to ensure that gender issues are taken into account in all aspects of conflict prevention, peacekeeping and post-conflict reconstruction.

What does this mean? By the end of this lesson, and certainly by the end of this course, you will have a much better idea of what “taking gender issues into account” means. At the end of this lesson, a list of concrete implications for peacekeeping that “gender mainstreaming” involves will be provided. Where did the ideas about women in SCR 1325 come from?

Changing Conceptions of Women Over Time in UN Documents: Pre-cursors to SCR 1325 Women are the Same as Men A vast literature exists on women’s links to peace processes within the United Nations since its establishment in 1945.18 For more than half a century, formal equality between men and women has been recognized and affirmed by the United Nations Charter (26 June 1945) and by Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (10 December 1948). However, in that period of 18 The information on the historical background on resolution 1325 has been summarized from Sara Poehlman-Doumbouya (WILPF consultant to the Peacewomen Project), WILPF, Women and Peace in United Nations Documents: An Analysis (New York: 2002).

history very few women participated at the highest level of decision-making in either national governments or international organizations.19 For many years, the formal “equality” between women and men that existed on paper within United Nations’ recommendations, decisions, and standards effectively meant that women were assumed to have the same needs and concerns as men.

Poster for SCR 1325 (2000), in French. Translation: “Equality between the sexes: Consolidation of Durable Peace.” (Source: http://www. un.org/womenwatch/ianwge/taskforces/wps/poster-french.jpg)

Women as Especially Vulnerable Victims The first resolution specifically recognizing gender as a factor that could produce differential impacts on women and men was one that protected women and children in emergencies and armed conflict, and it was adopted by the General Assembly on 16 December 1966. However, this resolution only identified women as victims in need of help, rather than as participants who might have unique contributions to offer in negotiating their own security.

19 For this reason it is all the more noteworthy that the United States’ first lady at the time, Eleanor Roosevelt, championed the cause of women during and after the Second World War. Less well known is the fact that during the negotiations leading up to the adoption of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, it was a female delegate from India who put forward the amendment to Article 25 that added sex to the list of identity classes protected from discrimination (along with such terms as ethnic origin, colour, religion, and belief).

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Women as Active Agents/Participants Throughout the decolonization struggles of the 1960s, women made enormous contributions and sacrifices in countries fighting for national liberation, even when women’s rights were not on the agenda of international conferences or at the General Assembly. Nevertheless, the equality of rights between men and women was becoming a controversial issue in the UN Trusteeship Council and elsewhere in international discussions and within some national campaigns. A large network of groups and organizations was slowly and quietly evolving to promote the concept of meaningful gender equality, and to persuade governments that women in the economy and society should be seen not only as recipients of aid but as active participants in development and peace processes. Many of the newly independent countries recognized and incorporated gender equality clauses in their constitutions. The first UN World Conference on Women in Mexico in 1975, and its associated document, the Mexico Plan of Action, called for greater representation of women in international discussions of peace and security issues.

political and economic equality with men, especially women’s active participation in decision-making at all levels from home life to international governance, together with sustainable global development, are necessary preconditions for peace.

By 1995, the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing linked women with special vulnerabilities to violence, as well as to peace initiatives once again. But this time, it connected both more directly and concretely to a demand that more women be posted to highly ranked decision-making positions in peace and security.

Bringing it All Together at Windhoek Thus, the intensity and degree of violence against women has allowed advocates to gain ground on their behalf, on the behalf, that is, of women defined as a population in need of special protection. However, historically it has been difficult to change the fact that women were largely missing from discussions on the means to achieve peace and security. Women continued to be seen more as passive victims than as active agents capable of direct involvement in decision-making about conflict resolution and peacebuilding.

During a comprehensive review on UN peacekeeping in Windhoek, Namibia, in 2000, participants developed a new strategy for promoting women’s inclusion and participation in UN peace operations. This is known as the Windhoek Declaration and the Namibia Plan of Action on Mainstreaming a Gender Perspective in Multidimensional Peace Support Operations.20

The Fourth World Conference on Women opens in Beijing, China.

(UN Photo #66728, Yao Da Wei, September 1995)

The decade from 1985 to 1995 brought sharper attention to the issue of violence against women, thus returning to a focus on women as victims.

However, throughout, emerging UN documents continued to emphasize this basic point: women’s

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Activism emerging from Windhoek coalesced with other efforts by women’s rights advocates that had begun in the spring of 1999 (described in detail in Lesson 10). Ultimately, this led to several organizations coming together to successfully lobby for the drafting and eventual adoption of SCR 1325. This resolution on Women, Peace and Security addresses both the special concerns of 20 (S/2000/693) see: http://www.peacewomen.org/ un/pkwatch/WindhoekDeclaration.html. See also United Nations, Panel on UN Peace Operations, UN Document A/55/305-S/2000/809 (New York: UN, 21 August 2000).

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women as victims of armed conflict, and it calls on signatories to both enforce existing women’s rights and ensure that women are incorporated fully and equally into participation at every level of decision-making in positions having to do with peace and security issues. Thus, women are described in the resolution both as in need of protection and as important sources of strength and wisdom in providing solutions to the problems that endanger peace and security for all.

Confronting the Limits of Aspiration In spite of this major success, SCR 1325 and its advocates confront two daunting dilemmas. The first is a dilemma confronting all UN treaties and resolutions, a dilemma that is called here the “limits of aspiration.” The second will be described below as “the paradox of identity.”

In a 2006 report by a coalition of organizations known as the NGO Working Group on Women, Peace and Security, the implementation of SCR 1325 is evaluated “six years on” in relation to the work of a recently established body within the UN called the Peacebuilding Commission (PBC). The PBC was set up to “advise and propose integrated peacebuilding, development and reconstruction strategies for countries emerging from violent conflict” and is specifically obliged to implement SCR 1325 in “the achievement of durable peace and development.”21 The Six Years On Report concludes that: Despite a few rhetorical flourishes, to which women’s rights advocates might refer in an effort to hold the United Nations accountable to its commitments, the short, sad fact is that, to date, there are no structural or institutionalized mechanisms to ensure women’s participation or representation in the PBC or to ensure that women’s needs, capacities, interests and rights are addressed in the PBC’s work. Six years after SCR 1325’s adoption, the international community must recognize this grave and dangerous omission, and take swift action to redress it.22

This does not mean that SCR 1325 has not been implemented at all; this is far from the case as will be seen in sections below. However, it does mean that many barriers of institutional inertia and lack of political will remain between the ideals articulated within SCR 1325 and their full actualization in practice. This is hardly unique to issues related to women’s rights. Many of the ideals expressed in human rights and humanitarian law remain stronger in language than in implementation.

However, this has been true historically of all major social advances: ideals precede their execution, sometimes by decades or even centuries. This course is designed to help you move the process of operationalizing SCR 1325 forward.

Jan Eliasson (second from left), president of the 60th session of the General Assembly, addresses journalists after addressing a session of the Organizational Committee of the Peacebuilding Commission (PBC) on its first meeting. UNHQ New York. (UN Photo #120708, Eskinder Debebe, June 2006)

21 NGOWG, op. cit. 2, cover page.

22 Ibid., p. ix.

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1.4 The Paradox of Identity (or the Trouble with Suggesting Women = Peace) The second dilemma confronting efforts to implement SCR 1325 – indeed, a dilemma confronting all efforts to redress gender inequality by specifically naming and describing women’s rights – is linked to the problem of describing women as a group at all. Any time one generalizes about a group of people on the basis of an identity, like gender, race, religion, age, culture, or nationality, one inevitably and immediately encounters the following five problems:

• The apparent erasure of all differences

within that identity group; to speak of women as a group worldwide is to seem to ignore innumerable differences among women: differences in culture, age, race, ethnicity, heritage, sexuality, caste, family of origin, etc.

• Even when simultaneous multiple identities are

acknowledged, to speak of women primarily seems to privilege gender as though it is the most important among all other possible identities. This is not at all how every woman feels about her gender. Nor is it necessarily how most women experience their gender all the time, any more than most men experience themselves as specifically male (as opposed to simply human) all the time.

• The reinforcing of the (false) idea that women will always and everywhere have more in common with one another than they will with any given group of men. As will be discussed in Lesson 2, empirical research has shown that while men and women do differ consistently in a few traits (genitalia, reproductive organs, etc.), for most characteristics, the range of differences within large separate-sex groups of men or women tends to be greater than the averaged differences between the sexes. Thus, when women are spoken of as a group, the mistaken idea that they are always more alike as a group (and more different from men as a group) is strengthened.

• The supporting of negative stereotypes by

simple opposition. If women are stereotyped as having X or Y characteristics in any given

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society, the problem is not simply that the characteristics are described inaccurately. The problem is describing all women as though they are the same. Hence, in the very countering of stereotypes, one can end up replacing one stereotype with another. For example, the statement “all women are vulnerable and weak” might be countered with the claim that “women can be protective and strong.” Even though the second statement is less inclusive, both statements still generalize.

• The supporting of positive stereotypes by

opposition or endorsement. This is the same problem as above, with a different twist. For example, if women are stereotyped as being empathic and peaceful, one counter-strategy would be to object that many women are insensitive and violent; another would be to embrace this stereotype as one worth owning. In that case, one might argue just as Virginia Woolf did, that yes, in fact, women are more empathic and peaceful. Once again, both kinds of counterclaims end up generalizing, which in turn takes us back to problems 1-3.

Taken together, these problems make up the paradox of identity. Systems of inequality in which one group has been discriminated against on the basis of an identity are facilitated by stereotypes about that group. As the Tunisian scholar Albert Memmi famously wrote in his 1957 book, The Colonizer and the Colonized, the colonizer produces an artificial image of the colonized whereby the latter becomes the “Other.” This perception enables the colonizer to justify colonization.23 In fighting for equality, the 23 In analogizing his theory to feminism, U.S. philosopher Nancy Hartsock summarizes Memmi as follows: “First, the Other is always seen as... lacking in the valued qualities of the society, whatever those qualities may be. Second, the humanity of the Other becomes ‘opaque.’

Colonizers can frequently be heard making statements such as ‘you never know what they think. Do they think? Or do they instead operate according to intuition?’ ...Third, the Others are not seen as fellow individual members of the human community, but rather as part of [an] anonymous collectivity” (160-161). Nancy Hartsock, “Foucault on Power: A Theory for Women?” in Feminism/ Postmodernism, ed. Linda J. Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1990): 157-175 (quoting Albert Memmi,

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subordinated group finds it necessary to counter these stereotypes. However, paradoxically, in countering the stereotypes, it is difficult for the group to avoid generalizing about itself in the name of liberation.

Since there is no way for a course about violence against women and women’s human rights to avoid generalizing about women, this introduction will simply call attention to the fact that such generalizations carry the inherent risks listed above.

Why SCR 1325 is Worth the Risks Given this complexity, one might well ask why SCR 1325 was necessary in the first place. One might even wonder why this course is necessary. To answer these questions, we might begin with the following remarks by former Secretary-General Kofi Annan, in his 2002 statement to the UN Security Council: Existing inequalities between women and men, and patterns of discrimination against women and girls, tend to be exacerbated in armed conflict. Women and girls become particularly vulnerable to sexual violence and exploitation.

Women and children make up the majority of the world’s refugees and internally displaced persons. […] Some women may be forced to follow camps of armed forces, providing domestic services and/or being used as sexual slaves. But if women suffer the impact of conflict disproportionately, they are also the key to the solution of conflict. […] The world can no longer afford to neglect the abuses to which women and girls are subjected in armed conflict and its aftermath, or to ignore the contributions that women make to the search for peace.

It is time they are given the voice in formal peacebuilding and peacemaking processes that they deserve. Sustainable peace and security will not be achieved without their full and equal participation.24 The Colonizer and the Colonized [Boston: Beacon Press, 1967], pp. 83, 85).

24 UN Secretary-General’s Statement to the Security Council on Women, Peace and Security, Press Release, 2002. (WIW p. 109)

One could argue that this statement contains stereotyped images of women as victims, as well as of women as especially capable of peacebuilding. First, the Former Secretary-General says, women suffer terribly from conflict, and even more so than men because of systemic gender inequalities that are worsened by conditions of war.

Second, for this very reason, women must be given a full voice in formal peacemaking processes. They are “the key to the solution of conflict.”

With regard to the first point, claims of women’s victimization do not challenge gender roles in many societies because they stay comfortably within stereotypes of women’s relative weakness compared with men, or their vulnerability to men’s violence. They also either bring to mind images of men in their stereotypical roles as protectors or remind us of men’s other stereotypical roles as victimizers. However, while it may not undermine stereotypes to say that women suffer, it is challenging in many contexts to demand that this suffering be addressed as an urgent problem with worldwide consequences of the utmost importance.

The argument here is not that women are victimized, nor that they are vulnerable because of weaknesses inherent in the female sex. Rather, it is that women’s vulnerability is significantly increased by socially organized systems of gender inequality.

In other words, women’s greater vulnerability, especially but not solely in conditions of armed conflict, stems from social structures that tend to give most men more access to resources and decision-making power than most women possess (see Lesson 3).

In a related manner, the second point in the former Secretary-General’s quote above signals the struggle for women to be seen as agents, or actors, as powerful individuals and collectives themselves able to change social systems and to make policies that can transform the nature of security and conflict resolution. The history of women’s limited representation in positions of power within the world’s governments, its most powerful economic, legal and political institutions, and within the United Nations itself, provides abundant evidence that formal gender equality in law is only a beginning.

Real gender equality will require significant institutional change.

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These are the reasons advocates believed that a resolution like SCR 1325 was necessary, even those who worried it might reinforce stereotypical thinking about women as victims or women as especially peaceful. This course, in turn, risks generalizing about women, first, because research has shown that violence is greatest in conditions of inequality; second, as subsequent lessons will show, gender-based violence too can be linked to systemic patterns of inequality between men and women, even across otherwise widely differing social and cultural contexts. The Member States of the United Nations have recognized this fact and endorsed a number of measures designed to eliminate gender discrimination and to reduce, prevent, and punish violence against women.

SCR 1325 is the resolution most relevant to peacekeepers in this respect, which is why this course opens with it.

Above all, the adoption of SCR 1325 has represented at least partial success in the struggle to achieve international recognition of the connections between, on the one hand, gender inequality and violence, and on the other hand, the specific gender inequalities that have excluded women from peacebuilding processes.

The remainder of this lesson will discuss some of the ways in which SCR 1325 has thus far been interpreted and implemented, as well as the challenges ahead in improving its implementation.

1.5

Implementing SCR 1325

In a report on the resources required to incorporate gender perspectives into all phases of peace support operations, the UN Secretary-General provided the following guidelines: [B]eginning with needs assessment missions through post-conflict peace-building...[gender] perspectives should be considered in analysis, policy and strategy development and planning of peace support operations, as well as training programmes and instruments developed to support effective implementation of those operations, such as guidelines, handbooks and codes of conduct. All aspects and all levels of peace support operations require attention to gender perspectives.25 25 From the Secretary-General’s report on

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The report goes on to list the following specific contexts in which “attention to gender issues is critical”:

• Political analysis; • Military operations; • Civilian police activities; • Electoral assistance; • Human rights support; • Humanitarian assistance, including for refugees and displaced persons;

• Development and reconstruction activities; • Public information; • Training of troops and civilian police; • Balance of personnel in interim governments; • Capacity-building to ensure gender balance in interim bodies; and

• Explicit routine reports tracking progress related to the integration of gender perspectives, and identifying the number and levels of women involved in all aspects of the mission.

To return to a question posed earlier in this lesson: what do phrases like “attention to gender issues” or “incorporation of gender perspectives” really mean? A detailed discussion of the term gender will follow in Lesson 2, but for now, a preliminary answer can be found in the UN’s definition of gender mainstreaming. Official UN policy defines gender mainstreaming as: … the process of assessing the implications for women and men of any planned action, including legislation, policies or programmes, in all areas and at all levels. It is a strategy for making women’s as well as men’s concerns and experiences an integral dimension of the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies, and programmes in all political, economic and societal spheres so that women resource requirements for implementation of the report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations, 27 October 2000 (A/55/507/Add.1), quoted in UNIFEM, “Security Council Resolution 1325 Annotated and Explained,” pp.6-7. www. womenwarpeace.org/toolbox/Annotated_1325.pdf accessed 18 March 2007.

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and men benefit equally and inequality is not perpetuated. The ultimate goal is to achieve gender equality.26 In applying gender mainstreaming to the implementation of SCR 1325, the UN has generally followed one or more of three basic approaches:

of the experiment, it will certainly be interesting to observe how the Liberian peacekeeping force addresses gender and other issues in the field, as well as the lessons its all-woman make-up will have to teach us about gender mainstreaming efforts generally.

• Inclusion of gender mainstreaming tools directly into the mission’s mandate;

• Integration of a gender dimension to all substantial activities of a mission; and

• Dispatching experts on gender issues (gender advisers) to missions.

As of March 2007, the resolutions establishing seven out of 15 then-current peacekeeping missions explicitly mention SCR 1325 and “call for the incorporation of a gender perspective,” “the establishment of a gender component within the staff of [the] mission,” and/or “for an expanded role for women in UN field operations among military, police and civilian personnel.”27 Most recently, the UN has experimented with an all-female peacekeeping contingent. The first such contingent, made up of 103 policewomen from India, arrived in Liberia in January 2007 (see Box 10-B in Lesson 10).28 While it is too soon to evaluate the results 26 The United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) Agreed Conclusions 1997/2.

A further explanation of gender policy decisions, medium term plans, programme budgets, and institutional structures and processes.

Mainstreaming entails bringing the perceptions, experience, knowledge and interests of women as well as men to bear on policy-making, planning and decision-making. OSAGI, Gender Mainstreaming; An Overview (New York: United Nations, 2002), at http://www.un.org/womenwatch/osagi/pdf/ factsheet1.pdf, 1.

27 Information compiled from the following sites on 27 March 2007: http://www.peacewomen.org/ un/sc/1325_Monitor/RW/theme_PK_Ops.htm and http://www.un.org/Depts/dpko/dpko/index.asp.

28 The armed police unit will help stabilise Liberia, which, after years of war, is trying to rebuild its own police force from scratch. About twenty men accompanied the group of 103 women to provide logistical support. India deployed the contingent, from its Central Reserve Police Force, after a request from the UN to consider providing women peacekeepers. The Central Reserve Police Force women have experience from India’s insurgency-prone areas, like Jammu and Kashmir and the North East, as well as in Sri Lanka as a

The Special Representative of the Secretary-General, William Swing, addresses the personnel of MONUC on sexual violence and exploitation.

(Photo MONUC, Kevin Jordan, December 2004)

Including Gender Mainstreaming Tools in the Mission Mandate A mission’s mandate establishes the type and range of activities of the mission. In this approach, gender issues are included in the mandate of a peacekeeping operation to the same degree that humanitarian aid, child protection, political analysis, and military concerns or human rights issues are included. While many mandates of peacekeeping operations have made reference to the impact of violence on women and girls, it is only recently that some have begun to include any explicit commitment to gender equality. In the absence of concrete directives in the mandate, there can be a tendency for gender issues to be addressed only randomly, according to the importance attributed to them by the head and staff of the mission. As of March 2007, there are no women serving as Heads of Mission or Special Representatives of the Secretary-General (SRSG) in peacekeeping missions, with only one woman at the level of Deputy SRSG (in Afghanistan - UNAMA).29 part of the Indian Peacekeeping Force.

29 Until 2000, only 4 women had ever served as UN SRSGs.

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WATCH:

SIDE BY SIDE – WOMEN, PEACE AND SECURITY

This 30-minute documentary, which was jointly developed by the Australian Government’s Australian Civil-Military Centre and UN Women, explores the ways in which the international community have met – and can continue to meet – its commitments on women, peace, and security. To view the video, either click on the image above or go to: http://www.peaceopstraining.org/e-learning/course_media_page/1154/side-by-side-women-peace-and-security/ However, when gender mainstreaming tools have been built into the mandate and strongly supported through ties to local women’s communities, the results have been promising. An example of this can be found in Burundi: SCR 1545, which established the UN operation in Burundi (ONUB) in May 2004, makes specific mention of SCR 1325 and requests that attention be given to the special needs of women and children in relation to disarmament, demobilization and reintegration and the protection of human rights. Furthermore, it requests that the Secretary-General ensure that “ONUB’s personnel give special attention to issues related to gender equality.” 30 Without a doubt, both the decision to include gender equality in the ONUB mandate and the mission’s subsequent active engagement with women’s organizations were greatly facilitated by the groundwork laid by their years of activism in Burundi prior to the establishment of ONUB. Four years earlier, in spite of having been excluded from 30 Op. cit. 2, p. 39, quoting SCR 1545. S/ RES/1545. New York: United Nations Security Council, 2004.

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formal peace negotiations in Arusha, women and women’s organizations were already advocating strongly for the inclusion of their concerns in the peace process. Continued activism by women’s groups in Burundi led to a requirement in the new constitution that 30% of all government seats go to women, and elections in 2005 landed an even higher percentage of posts for women. Further reinforcing these positive precedents, “[in] a speech on 20 September 2006, Burundi President Pierre Nkurunziza called on the [Peacebuilding Commission] and the UN system to make gender equality a priority, emphasizing that his government regarded this as crucial to alleviating poverty,” and thus to avoiding a relapse into violence.31 Integrating a Gender Dimension into All of a Mission’s Substantial Activities The second approach to implementing SCR 1325 begins with addressing gender concerns in the initial phase of a mission: during needs assessment, operations planning, and policy development. Once the mission is underway, gender perspectives are incorporated into the 31 Ibid.

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instruments used to support the implementation of operations on the ground, such as guidelines and codes of conduct. In the end, the extent to which gender was integrated throughout the mission is included in the monitoring and reporting system.

This last requirement is one specifically mentioned in SCR 1325; the reporting situation in 2000 was deemed far from satisfactory, and implementation of the resolution cannot be evaluated without an improved understanding of the different impacts of armed conflicts on men and women, as well as an assessment of how missions are performing.

The UN Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues and the Advancement of Women (OSAGI) undertook a study of 264 Secretary-General’s reports to the Security Council for the period between January 2000 and September 2003. The aim of the study was to analyse to what extent the reports included gender perspectives, as required by different official documents, particularly SCR 1325. This analysis revealed that only 18 per cent of the reports made multiple references to gender concerns, 15 per cent made minimal reference, and 67 per cent of the reports made no, or only one, mention of women or gender issues. The vast majority of the reports citing gender concerns mentioned the impact of conflict on women and girls as victims – not as potential dynamic actors in reconciliation, peacebuilding, or post-conflict reconstruction.32 Dispatching Gender Experts to Missions This approach has been by far the most heavily utilized in implementing SCR 1325. The UN makes use of at least two kinds of gender expert positions: gender focal points and gender advisors. Gender focal points are responsible for improving gender balance in peacekeeping operations. As such, they work on such personnel issues as “recruitment, promotions, employment discrimination and sexual harassment.”33 As of March 2007, five peacekeeping missions had a gender focal point.34 32 Office of the Special Adviser for Gender Issues and Advancement of Women, An analysis of the Gender Content of Secretary-General’s Reports to the Security Council (January 2000 – September 2003) (7 October 2003), 1.

33 See Gender Resources Package: http://pbpu. unlb.org/pbpu/genderpack.aspx accessed 20 March 2007.

34 http://www.peacewomen.org/un/pkwatch/facts.

Former Secretary-General Kofi Annan salutes the participants at the conference of justice for people living in post-conflict zones, organised

by UNIFEM and the CIAJ at UNHQ. (UN Photo #37021 by Ky Chung, September 2004)

Gender advisors, beyond their mandate-specific tasks, are generally responsible for incorporating gender concerns in all the activities of the mission.

This may consist of conducting awareness raising and training on these issues to all staff, including military and civilian personnel at all levels, initiating empowerment of local women to increase their participation in peace processes, and assisting to launch national mechanisms for gender concerns.

There is also a central Gender Advisor based in the Peacekeeping Best Practices Unit at the Headquarters of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) in New York.

Two gender advisors had been posted to peacekeeping operations in the year 2000. Four years later, out of 17 then-current peacekeeping operations, there were 10 with “a dedicated full-time gender advisory capacity – which could mean either a formalized unit with a number of staff working on gender issues, or a single gender advisor post.”35

html accessed 27 March 2007. A current list of Gender Focal Points by country, name and email address may also be obtained at this site.

35 Ibid. For a list of the names, email addresses, and in some cases, mission websites of these advisors, go to: http://www.peacewomen.org/un/ pkwatch/facts.html.

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Several examples of the work and accomplishments of gender advisers and gender units can be cited. For instance, in the UN Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC), the senior gender adviser developed a two-pronged strategy to ensure that a gender perspective was integrated into the mission’s policies and programmes, and to interface with civil society organizations, especially women’s groups.36 In the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET), the Gender Unit assisted the East Timorese Women’s Network in implementing the Beijing Platform for Action (see Lesson 6). In Sierra Leone, the gender adviser was placed in the Human Rights Unit through an agreement between UNDPKO and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). She created a Women’s Task Force for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to give particular attention to gender-based violence during armed conflict. She also undertook research on war-related sexual abuses, together with an NGO whose focus was the promotion and protection of women’s rights in post-conflict societies.

Despite some of the real successes achieved by gender advisers in the field, significant institutional barriers have hampered their work. According to an Independent Experts’ Assessment conducted by the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) in 2002, gender advisers have regrettably been working without budgets or proper backup from headquarters; thus, they have often lacked clarity about their own mandates and felt isolated from official communication channels.

[S]o far, the range of responsibilities given to gender advisers appears to exceed both their authority and their limited resources. […] Aside from needing adequate staff, gender units need a strategy and plan of action that comes from the highest level, indicating a serious commitment to integrating gender issues in all activities of the mission.37 36 See Box 10-A: Democratic Republic of Congo – The Office of Gender Affairs in MONUC (Lesson 10).

37 E. Rehn and E. Johnson Sirleaf, Women War Peace: The Independent Assessment on the Impact of Armed Conflict on Women and Women’s Role in Peace-Building (New York: UNIFEM, 2002), 68.

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While assessments of the “gender expert approach” to implementing SCR 1325 have been mixed, some extremely committed individual experts and their colleagues on missions, working closely with local civil society organizations, have been able to accomplish a great deal.

1.6 Conclusion: Re-Thinking what “Gender Mainstreaming” and SCR 1325 Require As this course will argue, the reasons behind the limits of the “gender expert approach” are complex and go beyond the simple failure to sufficiently fund high-level gender advisory posts or write clear operational mandates for gender mainstreaming.

They have to do with the fundamentally misguided way in which gender issues can be and have been conceptualized. While women and girls make up half the population or more in many post-conflict countries, the consideration of issues affecting women have typically been treated as special or separate – issues to be considered after plans have already been made. In practice, this approach creates peace support operations that assume whole societies are male – or at least that those societies have only the needs and concerns that come to mind for some male policy makers who are designing operations. It assumes that it is possible to construct a general approach that will work for everyone, and that women’s needs will vary only a little bit around the edges. These are the critical themes of gender mainstreaming and SCR 1325 that are addressed in this course.

Real gender mainstreaming requires a fundamental change of orientation in this thinking. As one report puts it: In every aspect of reconstruction — from rebuilding roads to rebuilding political structures — every decision taken, every project funded, and every policy implemented will have a gendered impact. The impact may be to reinforce the status quo, or to change it, but no matter whether peacebuilders consciously analyze the gendered effects of their programmes or not, they are de facto making decisions about gender. When preparing to hold elections, for example, planners de facto

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reinforce men’s political dominance if they do not consciously ask questions such as: do men and women in the society get their information in different locations, or from different media?; do men and women require different kinds of voter education or respond to different “get out the vote” messages?; will women be willing to stand on line and vote next to men?; what provisions will be made for the care of young children while women stand on line for hours in the hot sun?; do women have different physical security needs when they vote than men do? Whether or not one thinks it desirable to wait and deal with gender “further down the road,” it simply is not possible, as gender is a part of every action in the present. The question, then, is not when to turn to thinking about gender; it is whether or not an individual is thinking in an informed manner about the gendered impact of every aspect of his or her work.38

Of course, here one runs immediately into that paradox of identity again. Do all women respond to one kind of voter education and all men another? Do women really do all the childcare in this community? Are women the only ones with physical security needs? However, to begin by asking these kinds of questions about gender is a crucial first step. The following case example from Mali provides an excellent illustration of how much is gained by including thoroughgoing attention to women in a disarmament programme.

Such programmes, because they deal with arms – and typically men are associated with armaments – have historically been designed with only men in mind. This case study shows how short-sighted and ineffective such designs have been and how much more effective they can be when women are taken into account. At the same time, the study reveals the risks of assuming all women are alike (see Box 1-A as follows).

Box 1-A: The Relevance of Women’s Role in Micro Disarmament — The United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) Case Study in Mali Among micro disarmament policies, the exchange of development aid for weapons held by civilians in post-conflict areas is becoming increasingly popular with donors. Although such policies are often aimed at men, who generally tend to hold the weapons, UNIDIR’s field research in Mali in March 2003 found that successful projects tend to involve the avid participation of the entire community, that is, of both men and women.

In Mali, women played an indispensable part in securing a favourable climate for handing over weapons. In the face of violence, women served to persuade men as their wives, sisters, mothers and in-laws to give up their weapons. They organized inter-community meetings, involved the media, visited cantonment areas, and persuaded male family members to hand over their weapons. In a certain village, an elder woman told the UNIDIR research team that she had threatened her young male family members by saying that she would go naked in public unless they handed over their weapons. Women played a major role in the early process of peacebuilding, and the male community members highly appreciated their contribution. Women also tend to maintain a holistic view of the goal of weapons collection. In Mali, both men and women agreed that the final goal of weapons collection is to eradicate poverty and bring peace to the community. However, when asked to elaborate on this thought, men and women reacted differently. For women, the aim of weapons collection programmes was to bring reconciliation among the various ethnic factions in the community, resumption of free transportation, and provision of opportunities for young men. Male community members tended to focus on reducing the number of weapons in circulation. While men could identify correctly the most effective procedures for collecting weapons, women emphasized that the ultimate purpose of collecting weapons is peacebuilding in the community.

38 Op. cit. 2, p. 18.

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Women in Mali proved also to be capable of identifying effective aid incentives for weapons collection projects.

When asked how to judge the success of weapons collection projects, men focused on such material factors as the number of weapons collected and destroyed, and as well as the reduction of gun-related crime and injuries.

They also identified the building of roads and bridges as appropriate incentives for handing over weapons.

Compared to men, women stressed the need to address the root causes of violent conflict. Moreover, women deemed projects such as provision of water wells, grain mills and cereal banks, that is the projects that provide basic needs for daily lives such as water and food, as the best sort of incentives to be provided in exchange for weapons. Women also explained that effective weapons for development projects should be linked to the underlying causes of small arms and light weapons problems. In particular, they emphasized the importance of job creation for young men in economically marginalized communities. This suggests that involving women in project design and evaluation can help donors in the selection of incentives for weapons collection programmes.

From the Mali experience it would seem that men and women contribute to each stage of a weapons collection process in a complementary manner. Gender consideration in programmes of weapons collection seems then a matter of pragmatics. Involving both men and women in the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation is key for effective projects. But how can the contribution of women in this respect be maximized?

First and foremost, the international assistance community should make sure that women are involved in the decision-making process. Although there is a desire to involve them, they are often left aside when projects are implemented, because they are more tied to their housework. In Mali, once weapons collection began, women’s role in the process decreased. Therefore, the international community needs to pay more attention to maintaining women’s participation throughout the implementation of such projects.

One way to encourage women’s participation would be to incorporate participatory monitoring and evaluation techniques into weapons collection programmes. These methods, long practised in the fields of health and development, have the potential to facilitate communication among the actual beneficiaries of the projects. The techniques involve group discussion and visual aids such as flow charts, to enable as many members of the community as possible to participate. It is important to pay attention even to meeting times. In Mali, urban women had less difficulty in participating in disarmament processes than rural women who generally tend to have less spare time that can be devoted to meetings. In this case, holding a meeting late in the afternoon (after daytime errands, before the preparation of dinner), for example, might allow more women to participate. When women are involved, their ‘heterogeneousness’ should not be overlooked. In Mali, women are altogether narrowly defined as wives and mothers. However, if they are unmarried, or do not fit in the social strata, they might be excluded from consideration, even by fellow women. An illustrative example is female ex-combatants. During its field research, the UNIDIR team came upon a few female ex-combatants in a community. When the research team asked to involve them in an ex-combatants’ discussion group, the male members of the group refused, because ‘they were women’. Likewise, when women were asked to integrate the female ex-combatants in their discussion group, they too declined, because ‘those women were fighters, not civilians’. Participatory monitoring and evaluation techniques are strong tools to involve various beneficiaries in aid programmes. However, one still needs to be sensitive to local conditions and to refine methodologies according to local context, in order to make all voices heard.

This lesson and this course suggest the following guidelines for re-thinking gender mainstreaming and the implementation of SCR 1325:

• Gender mainstreaming means, first, thinking

about women. Second, it means thinking about men and women relationally – how a society arranges its gender roles for the relationships between men and women. Third, it means thinking about how everything you do may affect each group differently and/or affect the relational dynamics between them.

• Attention to gender perspectives requires

recognition that gender is culturally contextual and that cultures are themselves not homogenous. Every culture has within it a range of different roles for men and women (see Lessons 2 and 5). At any given time, people may be entirely, or only partially, going along with their society’s accepted gender roles, or they may be resisting them.

• Gender mainstreaming means creating the

widest possible space for men and women to have equal access to resources and power, and to be equally involved in decisions about how things will be done.

• Gender mainstreaming may mean doing things differently so that more kinds of people can participate. It may mean dealing with men and women separately sometimes and together at others.

Source: M Vlachová and L Biason (eds.), Women in an Insecure World: Violence against women – facts, figures and analysis, Geneva, 2005, p. 198.

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End-of-Lesson Quiz 1. Which of the following are reasons why Security Council resolution 1325 calls for the incorporation of more women in peacebuilding activities at the UN? For each statement, place an X in the appropriate column.

Statement A. Because equality between women and men is essential to peace.

B. Because the UN recognizes that men are better at peacekeeping and women are better at peacebuilding.

C. Because women have long been excluded from decision-making positions related to peace, conflict, and security matters at the UN, and women’s equal participation with men is an important UN goal.

D. Because women and children are disproportionately impacted by armed conflicts.

True

2. What are the three main components of SCR 1325?

False

3. Women’s rights advocates first clearly articulated the relationships between gender inequality, development, and issues of peace and conflict at the 1975 UN World Conference on Women in Mexico.

These relationships were elaborated in future conferences. Which of the following statements does not correctly describe the claims of these women’s rights advocates?

A. Violence against women in the home has nothing to do with peace (which concerns violence against men and women in situations of armed conflict) or development issues; B. There can be no peace without women’s political and economic equality with men because inequality breeds violence; C. There can be no sustainable global development without women’s political and economic equality with men; D. Peace must include eliminating all violence against women, and to achieve it we must also strive for gender equality and development.

5. Which of the following is a key element of the official UN definition of gender mainstreaming?

A. Ensuring that an equal number of men and women work for every major mission and office of the UN; B. Identifying which spheres are women’s, and which are men’s, in every society served by UN missions; C. Assessing the implications for women and men of any planned action, in all areas and at all levels; D. Consideration of gender as a primary factor when filling positions for Heads of Mission and Special Representatives of the Secretary-General (SRSGs) in peacekeeping missions.

6. In applying gender mainstreaming to the implementation of SCR 1325, the UN has generally followed one or more of three basic approaches. What are they?

4. Which of the following statements best exemplifies the “paradox of identity” discussed in this lesson?

A. Talking about women’s victimization can make them seem weak and vulnerable; paradoxically, this can undermine efforts to argue for their empowerment as leaders; B. Paradoxically, women can be both peaceful and violent, and men can be both victims of violence and its perpetrators; C. To claim an identity (such as ‘woman’) is to argue that one will always be a victim of oppression and violence;

7. In Question 6, which of the approaches has been most commonly used?

D. Women’s rights paradoxically require one to believe that gender is the most important feature of one’s identity.

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