by Rebecca Gerome, IANSA Women's Network
You may have
noticed women dressed in black handing out pins, postcards, and leaflets at the
entrance of the conference room yesterday. IANSA Women, members of the Women’s International
League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), women from Amnesty International, and the
Control Arms coalition wore black to remind all those participating in Arms
Trade Treaty negotiations that the arms trade is not just any trade. They wore
black to remind those present that the arms trade is about militarism, violence,
and war. And it has specific gender dimensions.
Women rarely
manufacture, sell, buy, or use weapons, yet they are disproportionately
affected by the arms trade and in particular, by the
proliferation and misuse of small arms and light weapons. While men are the
majority of those killed by small arms, women suffer in more invisible ways. High
death and injury rates of men are the most obvious and visible effects of gun
violence, yet what fails to appear in statistics is when guns are not used to
kill but to exert power; when guns are used behind closed doors to subjugate
family members; when guns are used to threaten adolescent girls with sexual
violence, forcing entire families to flee. What we fail to talk about, when we
talk about the arms trade, are the rapes of tens of thousands of women at
gunpoint.
There
is a strong correlation between carrying weapons and
notions of masculinity, considered to be traditional “gun-culture”. Armed
conflict changes men’s views about what qualifies as masculine behavior: group
pressure amplifies men’s aggressiveness and inclination to treat women as
inferior. Since almost all men are armed in times of conflict, it is inevitable
that their weaponry is implicated in the exercise of power over women.
For
example, armed men
perpetrate sexual violence at gunpoint against women and girls with impunity,
most famously in the Eastern DRC, but also in a number of countries that are
not necessarily at conflict.
Marie was
gang raped on 10 June 2010 in Port-au-Prince. “When you call [for help], people
hear but they don’t come out to help when there are people with guns around,”
she says. Her story is one of many others in Amnesty International’s January
2011 report on Haiti, entitled “Aftershocks: Women Speak Out About Sexual
Violence”. Most of the rape victims interviewed were threatened by groups of
men armed with guns.
By
facilitating domination and violence against women, guns prevent women from
exercising their basic rights on a daily basis, in the marketplaces where they
trade, in the fields where they work, at water-points and along the roads where
girls walk to school.
United
Nations Member States have progressively recognised that a gender perspective
needs to be included in all policies and programmes. The inclusion of
gender-based violence in the preamble of the Chair’s Paper is a good start, but
it is not enough. Gender-based violence must form an explicit part of the
criteria determining whether arms transfers are authorised.
Gender-based
violence can constitute a violation of human rights, a violation of
international criminal law, and in cases of armed conflict, a violation of international
humanitarian law. So why include a separate criterion on gender-based violence
if the criteria already covers those areas of international law?
The
Mission of Finland, Amnesty International, WILPF and the IANSA Women’s Network
co-organised a side event on this very topic. Panellists argued that if it is
not explicit, gender-based violence tends to be side-lined and ignored. More
importantly, a gendered analysis of the potential impacts of an arms transfer
is necessary in order to draw an accurate and complete picture of the
situation. Gender-based violence must be explicitly considered in any risk
assessment preceding each and every arms transfer decision.
107 civil society organisations and networks from
around the world have joined our call to include gender-based violence in the
criteria of the Arms Trade Treaty.
Six states
have shown support for the inclusion of gender-based violence in the preamble:
New Zealand, Australia, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium and Turkey. Botswana has
called for it to be in the goals and objectives of the treaty. 14 states have
taken the next logical step and supported the inclusion of gender-based
violence in the core part of the treaty, the criteria: Norway, Finland,
Ireland, Iceland, Sweden, Lithuania, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Gabon, Malawi, Kenya,
Zambia, Liberia and Samoa. We thank these states and call on all others to
seize this opportunity to make women safer and uphold their basic rights.
Violence
prevention is complex and difficult to achieve. The Arms Trade Treaty might
have the potential to be a step in this direction - if it includes strong
provisions and robust criteria on gender-based violence. It is time to seize
this opportunity to prevent gender-based violence and prove your commitment to women’s
rights.
For more
information, read the Joint Policy Paperon Gender and the Arms Trade Treaty by WILPF, IANSA, Amnesty International
and Religions for Peace:
