Written Statement of Amanda Klasing, Women’s Rights Researcher, Human Rights Watch, to US Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on International Operations and Organizations, Human Rights, Democracy, and Global Women’s Issues

Chairwoman Barbara Boxer, Ranking Member Rand Paul, and other members of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on International Operations and Organizations, thank you for the opportunity to submit a written statement for today’s hearing on violence and discrimination against women.  

Human Rights Watch has been documenting violence against women as a human rights violation for almost a quarter of a century. We are pleased that your Committee is taking up this issue as a global call to action, as we believe that it will take significant leadership on the part of the United States to prevent, punish and eliminate violence against women globally, and to ensure adequate protections and services for survivors.

On June 13, 2014, Secretary of State John Kerry said in a statement at the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict, held in London, “Gender-based violence, anywhere, is a threat to peace, security, and dignity everywhere.” Human Rights Watch could not agree more. Gender-based violence is pervasive in the lives of hundreds of millions of women and girls around the world, including in our own country. It is well past time for Congress to take meaningful action to address violence against women globally, Violence against women spans geography, class, age, race, caste, creed, disability and sexual orientation, and eradicating it will require comprehensive understanding of its many manifestations. In this submission, Human Rights Watch would like to direct the subcommittee’s attention to a few key areas of concern: child marriage; impact of conflict on women and girls; violence against women and girls with disabilities; and, women human rights defenders.

Child Marriage
Child marriage occurs when at least one of the parties of a marriage is below 18 years of age. It is a violation of human rights that disproportionately affects hundreds of millions of girls and women. Child marriage also violates other human rights, including the rights to education, freedom from violence, reproductive rights, access to reproductive and sexual health care, employment, freedom of movement, and the right to consensual marriage.

Human Rights Watch has documented human rights violations against married girls in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Iraq, Kenya, Malawi, Papua New Guinea, South Sudan and Yemen.[1] The accounts of the girls and women who were married as girls illustrate the profoundly detrimental impact of child marriage on their physical and mental well-being, education and ability to live free of violence. The consequences of child marriage do not end when child brides reach adulthood, but often follow them throughout their lives as they struggle with the health effects of being pregnant too young and too often, their lack of education and economic independence, domestic violence and marital rape.

The worst abuses linked to child marriage can be mitigated when governments set and enforce age limits for marriage, establish and enforce compulsory marriage registers, and prosecute perpetrators of forced marriage.

Impact of Conflict on Women and Girls
Human Rights Watch first documented sexual violence in conflict in 1993 in a report about Indian security forces in Kashmir that used rape to brutalize women and punish their communities. Since then, we have investigated and documented rape in numerous conflicts around the world, most recently in Afghanistan, Central African Republic, Colombia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Cote D’Ivoire, Guinea, Libya, Somalia, Sri Lanka, and Syria.[2] Regardless of the setting, we have found that efforts to hold attackers to account and medical and rehabilitation services for victims have largely been inadequate.

The international community has made progress in recognizing the prevalence of sexual violence and taken steps to address it. Rape in conflict is prosecuted as a war crime and a crime against humanity, and the United Nations Security Council, with leadership from the United States, passed a resolution in 2008 expressing its willingness to “adopt appropriate steps” to address widespread or systematic sexual violence. Security Council Resolution 1820 urges all parties to conflicts to provide sustainable assistance to victims of sexual violence in armed conflict and post-conflict situations. However, rape during and after war continues to terrorize women and girls, and impunity for these crimes is the norm. Most often survivors receive neither justice nor services, including comprehensive post-rape medical care.

In addition to sexual violence, Human Rights Watch has documented multiple abuses affecting women in war, including forced displacement; the targeting and punishment of women because of their own activism or activism by male relatives; the drive towards earlier, forced and child marriages because of instability and a lack of security for girls and younger women; an increase in domestic violence and sexual violence committed by civilians; lack of access to food, shelter and health care; the interruption of education; and, sexual exploitation and trafficking, to name but a few. When resources are mobilized to address sexual violence in conflict, they must also be deployed to address the full range of violations against women’s and girls’ rights that occur during and after conflict.

Lastly, women and girls may face specific and additional challenges to accessing education during conflict. In armed conflicts worldwide, students, teachers, and schools have been deliberately targeted. In some instances, female students and teachers and schools that educate girls and women are singled out. Armed groups have attacked, killed, and abducted female students because of opposition to girls and women receiving an education, or in opposition to adolescent girls and women receiving an education alongside boys and men. In addition, since 2005, government armed forces and non-state armed groups have occupied and used schools and universities for military purposes in at least 23 countries with armed conflict. The use of schools for military purposes endangers students’ and teachers’ safety as well as their education. Girls studying alongside soldiers inside their schools may be sexually harassed, abused, and raped. Parents of girls are often particularly unwilling to send their girls to schools that are being occupied out of real or perceived concerns about such risks. Activities such as soldiers using school toilet facilities and excluding adolescent girls from using them also negatively affect girls’ attendance and education.

Violence Against Women and Girls with Disabilities
Women and girls with disabilities who suffer gender-based violence face distinctive barriers to accessing gender-based and sexual violence prevention programs, post-violence medical care, and the justice system because of limitations in physical mobility, communication barriers, and isolation. These barriers leave them vulnerable to abuse, including physical and sexual violence.

In northern Uganda, for example, Human Rights Watch documented sexual violence against women with disabilities and found that more than one-third of 64 women with disabilities interviewed had experienced sexual or gender-based violence, often at the hands of relatives.[3] Women with disabilities have a greater chance of being raped because abusers perceive them as less able to defend themselves or demand justice for violence. For women with disabilities, the process of reporting violence may be more difficult because of limited access, such as when limited mobility impedes their ability to reach justice institutions or when such institutions lack sign language interpreters. Several women with disabilities explained to Human Rights Watch how their efforts to seek justice for such crimes had failed. Because of the stigma already associated with disability and the stigma associated with rape, women with disabilities have enormous difficulty reporting incidents of sexual violence to the local authorities.

Women and girls with disabilities also face many challenges in accessing reproductive and sexual health services, which may only be exacerbated if they are a victim of gender-based violence. In many countries, women with disabilities face ignorance, discrimination and verbal abuse from healthcare personnel. For example, our research in northern Uganda showed that women with disabilities who survive rape find it especially difficult to get post-exposure prophylaxis and other necessary treatment, such as emergency contraception, because of physically inaccessible transportation and healthcare facilities, as well as lack of confidentiality due to deaf women’s need to bring family members as sign language interpreters.[4]

Emergency shelters for survivors of domestic violence are inaccessible to women with disabilities in many countries. In Turkey, Human Rights Watch researched the response to domestic violence in six cities, and found that none of these locations had domestic violence shelters (state or private) that could accommodate women with physical disabilities.

Women Human Rights Defenders
In order to do our work effectively, Human Rights Watch collaborates closely with women and groups worldwide who fight for the rights of women. All human rights defenders may face risks, but we have seen firsthand that women defenders suffer additional threats and unique obstacles because they are women. The actions taken by governments are at times insufficient to address the gendered nature of risks and assaults. And even worse, we have documented examples where governments themselves target women human rights defenders.

Human Rights Watch has documented various abuses against women human rights defenders: physical attacks, hand-delivered threats, terrifying phone calls, sexual harassment, rape and threats against children of activists—all creating a chilling environment in an effort to silence these women. Often, no one is held accountable, and sufficient protection measures for these women are rare. 

In some contexts, governments themselves target, arrest, and assault women because of their activism for women’s rights. Human Rights Watch has documented sexual harassment and attacks on women by government forces for demonstrating in public. And, in some cases, women and girls have been arrested and abused by their male relatives because of their activism.

Many Human Rights Watch researchers have seen personally the tremendous toll that human rights work takes on women working at the grassroots level to seek justice for abused women, in particular victims of sexual violence. The women defenders I have worked with have been raped multiple times for their activism, have had their children threatened or abused, or have had to flee their homes. In one particularly difficult case, the stress of continuous threats led one woman defender to take her own life. I cannot imagine holding a hearing on the issue of combating violence against women without reflecting on the unmatched sacrifice and bravery of women human rights defenders around the world who are waging the difficult and daily fight to end violence in their own communities.

Recommendations
Human Rights Watch welcomes the global call to action raised by the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on International Operations and Organizations, Human Rights, Democracy, and Global Women’s Issues. Combatting violence against women requires a global effort to end abuses against women and girls. For years, Human Rights Watch has called for US ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of All Violence against Women. We renew that call, and are disappointed that it appears unlikely that there are sufficient votes necessary for ratification. We will continue to ask for the ratification. However, as fundamental first steps, Human Rights Watch recommends that the US Senate:

• Pass the bipartisan International Violence Against Women Act, S. 2307. 
• Request that the Secretary of State provide an update regarding the development and implementation of the multi-year and multi-sectoral strategy to end child marriage, as outlined in the domestic Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act passed in March 2013.
• Press the administration to provide leadership at the UN Security Council for following up on its resolutions related to women, peace and security.
• Call on the administration to provide public information regarding its progress in implementing the December 2011 US National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security and the US Strategy to Prevent and Respond to Gender-Based Violence Globally, including lessons learned and best practices.
• Ensure that US funding for services to victims of violence includes comprehensive post-rape medical care.  
• Urge the administration to show leadership in the global negotiations around the post-2015 sustainable development goals and push for the inclusion of a strong goal on gender equality and women’s rights, including targets related to ending gender-based violence, ending child marriage, and ending all forms of discrimination against women, all with clear target dates.
• Strengthen the US commitment to addressing accountability and justice for sexual violence in conflict by developing relevant benchmarks for all US assistance related to security sector reform, such as visible and clearly defined efforts from the recipient government to investigate and prosecute serious violations of international humanitarian law. This entails prosecuting individuals who were criminally liable because they ordered such crimes or who as a matter of command responsibility failed to prevent or punish them.