Silence about abuses against women hides the problems that destroy, and sometimes end, women's lives. Governments excuse and fail to take action against soldiers and prison guards who rape, police officers who forcibly traffick women, immigration officials who assault, judges who exonerate wife-murderers, and husbands who batter. They accept and defend domestic laws that discriminate on their face or in practice. Until recently, local and international human rights organizations, the United Nations and regional human rights bodies have approached human rights advocacy by focusing on a narrow interpretation of politically motivated abuse, while often failing to respond to the repression of women even when they challenge existing legal, political or social systems. Also neglected by governments and international organizations have been the range of abuses that women suffer because many of these violations did not conform to standard ideas of what constitutes human rights abuse. Thus, "Nada," a Saudi woman who sought political asylum in Canada in 1992, initially was denied refuge because persecution for her feminist views on the status of women in her country and her activities flowing from those beliefs—attempting to study in the field of her choice, to refuse to wear the veil, and to travel alone—was not deemed political. Similarly, in a notorious case in 1988, a U.S. immigration judge denied political asylum to Catalina Mejia, a Salvadoran woman who was raped by soldiers. In the judge's opinion, Mejia's rape by a Salvadoran soldier, who accused her of being a guerrilla, was not an act of persecution but rather the excess of a soldier acting "only in his own self-interest."2
The lack of documentation of violations of women's rights reinforces governments' silence; without concrete data, governments have been able to deny the fact of and their responsibility for gender-based abuse. Where human rights violations against women remain undocumented and unverified, governments pay no political or economic price for refusing to acknowledge the problem and their obligation to prevent and remedy abuse. One of the first challenges faced by the women's human rights movement has been to transform women's experiences of violence and discrimination into fact-basedproof of the scale and nature of such abuse and governments' role in its perpetuation.
Just as human rights groups historically have been the primary force in ensuring accountability for politically motivated human rights abuse, women's rights advocates are the vanguard in the fight for justice for gender-based violations. Thus, for example, they have won recognition that traditional notions of the political actor must be modified to acknowledge the political nature of women's efforts to challenge their subordinate status and the violence and discrimination that reinforce it. Women's rights advocacy has rejected the argument that governments bear no responsibility for the wide range of abuses perpetrated by private actors and argued to the contrary that governments must remedy and prevent such acts.
By building regional and international linkages that extend across cultural religious, ethnic, political, class, and geographic divides, women have developed effective political and legal strategies that strengthen their work domestically. Women's ability to secure their rights domestically is always subject to their countries' laws and willingness to enforce those laws. By calling upon the protections of the international human rights system, women are claiming rights that are not only morally desirable but also legally enforceable. Thus, for example, women's rights groups combating rape in custody in Pakistan cast the abuse not only as a criminal act under domestic law, but also as torture, a gross violation of international human rights norms. This strategy helped them to secure legal reform in Pakistan and to influence the approach of the international human rights community to the problem of custodial rape in their country.
In the past, absent support from their domestic legal systems, human rights organizations, and intergovernmental agencies, women often chose not to seek redress rather than risk reprisal and social ostracism in cultures that often blame the victim. As the international human rights system becomes more responsive to gender-based human rights violations, women who have previously been silent about their experiences of abuse are speaking up. Their testimonies add to the evidence of the scale and prevalence of abuses against women that the international community simply cannot afford to ignore.
2 Susan Forbes Martin, Refugee Women (London: Zed Books, Ltd., 1991), p. 24.
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