discrimination. CEDAW did not originally specify it as such, leading to waves of global activism and advocacy from feminists to address this gap. Finally, in 1992, the CEDAW Committee adopted General Recommendation No. 19 on violence against women. This unequivocally states that it is a form of gender-based discrimination that ‘seriously inhibits women’s ability to enjoy rights and freedoms on a basis of equality with men’.128 This and other subsequent gains were consolidated during the Beijing Conference in 1995, which recognized violence against women as a critical area in its official declaration, underlining that it is an impediment to the full enjoyment by women of their human rights. In recent years, United Nations intergovernmental and expert bodies have continued to advance the global agenda on violence against women, including at the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) at its fifty-seventh session in March 2013.129
STRENGTHENING WOMEN’S AGENCY, VOICE AND PARTICIPATION Redressing the socio-economic disadvantage that women experience and contesting the stereotypes, stigma and violence that directly and indirectly violate their rights require strengthening women’s agency, voice and participation, both at the individual and collective level. Agency refers to ‘the ability to define one’s goals and act upon them’.130 It is often associated with decision-making within households about the day-to-day allocation of resources and responsibilities. These decisions have implications for the capacity of women to exercise their rights in both the public and private spheres. Increasing women’s agency in intra-household decision-making is an important goal in itself and also has positive impacts on women’s own well-being as well as that of other household members, especially children. Women’s agency is affected by a variety of factors, including their earning capacity; social norms and laws governing marriage, divorce,
inheritance and child custody; and their social and collective engagements beyond their immediate family and kinship networks.131 Voice is defined in terms of ‘acts or arguments that influence public decisions – usually in public decision-making arenas like legislatures’.132 Voice and influence in decision-making, like agency, have intrinsic value as enabling individual and group enjoyment of democratic freedoms and rights. In addition, they serve to ensure that group-specific interests are represented and advanced in public policy and other decision-making arenas. For example, women’s voice is important in decisions over public spending priorities to ensure adequate provision of services, infrastructure and social security to guarantee their physical integrity and reproductive rights. The provision of better services for women enhances their power and agency within their intimate relations by reducing their dependence on other household members and giving them a stronger ‘fall-back’ position in case of conflicts or relationship breakdown. Participation can be understood as ‘organized efforts to increase control over resources and regulative institutions in given social situations on the part of groups and movements hitherto excluded from such control’.133 Meaningful participation of women is about more than just numerical presence in decision-making forums, whether at the local or national level. Women in decision-making positions must be able to articulate and act on issues that concern different groups of women, especially those who are disadvantaged. Women’s rights advocates and autonomous feminist organizations have a critical role to play here in bringing women’s concerns into the policy-making process and holding decisionmakers and service providers to account.134
Women’s voice and participation in politics and policy-making Recent years have seen a ‘rising tide’ of women’s political representation, with more women than ever before in elected national assemblies. The global average has been climbing and in 2014