three: From the streets to social policy: how to end gender-based violence against women

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Until the 1970s, violence against women (VAW) was framed as a private issue and remained conspicuously absent from the public sphere and policy debates. Today, owing to decades of protest by women’s movements in different parts of the world, VAW—and gender-based violence (GBV) directed against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, intersex and other non-heteronormative (LGBTQI+) individuals—is widely recognized as a serious human rights violation and a health problem that disproportionately affects women.

Patriarchy, which subjects women and girls to violence because of their sex, is the root cause of VAW and GBV. As the 1993 UN Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women (DEVAW) put it: [VAW] is a manifestation of historically unequal power relations between men and women, which have led to domination over and discrimination against women by men and to the prevention of the full advancement of women … [VAW] is one of the crucial social mechanisms by which women are forced into a subordinate position compared with men.

Feminists have always challenged the private–public dichotomy, which serves to depoliticize the unequal power relations within the home, where VAW often takes place. The terms used, as discussed by Ertürk (2016), to refer to the problem are instructive of the shifts in how VAW has been framed. The First World Conference on Women in Mexico City in 1975 made reference to “unity of the family and prevention of intra-family conflicts.” Five years later, at the Copenhagen Conference, a resolution on “battered women and the family” was adopted, and the concluding document made reference to “domestic violence.”

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