The Range and Severity of Abuse
In 1990 Human Rights Watch began working with colleagues in the human rights and women's movements around the world to apply the fact-finding and advocacy tools of the international human rights movement to documenting violations of women's human rights and seeking remedies for such abuse. We have exposed state-directed and state-approved violence against women; violence against women by private actors that is legally endorsed; violence against women by private actors that is illegal but is tolerated by the state through discriminatory enforcement of the law; and discriminatory laws and practices. We have explored abuses that are gender-specific either in their form—such as forced pregnancy and forced virginity exams—or in that they target primarily women—such as rape and the forced trafficking of women for purposes of sexual servitude.
Rampant abuses against women have traditionally been excused or ignored. Rape in situations of conflict by combatants is prohibited under international humanitarian law but until recently was dismissed as part of theinevitable "spoils of war." Domestic violence was regarded as a "private" matter only, not as a crime that the state must prosecute and punish. To the extent that control of women's sexuality and physical integrity is regarded as a matter of family or community honor rather than personal autonomy and individual rights, women in much of the world still face enormous obstacles in their search for redress when they have suffered abuse committed in the name of custom or tradition. Throughout the world, women are still relegated to second-class status that makes them more vulnerable to abuse and less able to protect themselves from discrimination.
As the country studies in this report show, governments often are directly implicated in abuses of women's human rights. Prison guards in many countries—studies in this report include the United States, Pakistan and Egypt—sexually assault women prisoners and detainees. Rape of women by combatants is frequently tolerated by commanding officers in the course of armed conflict and by abusive security officials in the context of political repression, as the examples of Kashmir, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Peru, Somalia and, Haiti illustrate. And, as our investigations of the trafficking of women and girls into forced prostitution have demonstrated, this ostensibly private commercial trade in human beings would be impossible without the active involvement of government officials, such as corrupt border guards and police who alternate between raiding brothels and profiting from them. Refugee and displaced women, in zones where U.N. or governmental protection is inadequate, are robbed and raped by security forces and camp officials, as described in the case study on Burmese women in this report.
Governments also have imposed, or refused to amend, laws that discriminate against women. In Pakistan, discriminatory evidentiary standards not only deny rape survivors access to justice, but also result in their arbitrary detention and thus expose them to further sexual violence by their jailers. As mothers or potential mothers, women face de jure discrimination in many countries. For example, Botswana men who marry foreigners have the right to pass Botswana citizenship on to their children; Botswana women do not.1 In Russia, women are routinely turned away from public sector jobs because they are considered less productive workers on account of their maternal responsibilities.
In other situations, governments apply gender-neutral laws in discriminatory ways or fail to enforce constitutional and other guarantees of nondiscrimination. In Thailand, laws that penalize both prostitution and procurement are applied in a discriminatory manner resulting in the arrest of female prostitutes but impunity for their predominately male agents, pimps, brothel owners, and clients. The Brazilian constitution, in another example, guarantees women equality before the law yet courts in Brazil have exonerated men who kill their allegedly adulterous wives in order to protect their honor.
The women's human rights movement has prompted investigation into another important area of human rights abuse: violence against women carried out by private actors that is tolerated or ignored by the state. As intractable as state-perpetrated violence against women is, women's health and lives are equally endangered by abuse at the hands of husbands, employers, parents, or brothel owners. Domestic violence, for example, is a leading cause of female injury in almost every country in the world and is typically ignored by the state or only erratically punished, as the studies of Brazil, Russia, and South Africa in this report reveal. In Kuwait, employers assault Asian women domestic workers, driving hundreds of women to flee to their embassies each year. Yet only a handful of abusive employers are investigated or prosecuted. To fulfill their international obligations, states are required not only to ensure that women, as victims of private violence, obtain equal protection of the law, but also that the conditions that render women easy targets for attack—including sex discrimination in law and practice—are removed.
Women's lack of social and economic security has compounded their vulnerability to violence and sex discrimination. We have found, for example, that numerous Burmese, Nepali, and Bangladeshi women and girls, seeking to escape poverty at home, accept fraudulent job or marriage offers that result in their being trafficked into forced prostitution. In South Africa, women's lack of access to alternative housing is one reason why some of them hesitate to report domestic violence. At the same time, the lack of access to political power and to equal justice—through the right to organize, to express opinions freely, to participate in the political process, and to obtain redress for abuse—is a central obstacle to women seeking to improve their social and economic status within their societies. At the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994, governments recognized that "advancing gender equality and equity and the empowerment of women, and the elimination of all kinds of violence against women, and ensuring women's ability to control their own fertility, are cornerstones of population and development-related programs." Similarly, the stated goals of the FourthWorld Conference on Women in Beijing—peace, equality and development—suggest that protection of women's human rights is inextricably connected to the improvement of women's status more generally.
1 Human Rights Watch/Africa and Women's Rights Project, "Botswana: Second Class Citizens: Discrimination Against Women Under Botswana's Citizenship Act," A Human Rights Watch Short Report, vol. 6, no. 7, (September 1994).
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