CAMPAIGNS: 16 Days Campaign: Militarism and Violence Against Women

CWGL-Center for Women's Global Leadership-is pleased to announce the theme for the upcoming 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence Campaign (2010). The following examples of issues that the campaign can address are central to the work of many IANSA women.

These include:

* A discussion of “genuine security” and gender justice;
* Proliferation of small arms and the role of arms in domestic violence;
* Reparations, healing and reconciliation;
* Global production and sale of arms;
* Domestic violence committed by members of the military;
* Sexual violence and sexual slavery in conflict situations;
* Women and girl combatants;
* Military spending by government – cost-analysis compared to social programs;
* Militarized police forces and social institutions (schools, public spaces, etc.)

Let's start planning to make this year's 16 Days a huge success and highlight the issues that we are working on and that are affecting us in our daily lives. The campaign announcement from CWGL is below and more information is online at: http://www.cwgl.rutgers.edu/16days/kit10/theme.html

Structures of Violence: Defining the Intersections of Militarism and Violence Against Women

This year marks the 20th 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence Campaign, and with this important landmark, the Center for Women's Global Leadership (CWGL) is considering new ways to utilize the campaign for transformative change. Year after year, new partners join the 16 Days Campaign to bring local, national, and global attention to the various forms of violence that women face. The attention that gender-based violence has received in international forums is a testimony to the powerful actions of women's rights activists around the world.

Yet, despite this increased awareness, women continue to experience violations in alarming numbers and new forms of violence are emerging. We, as defenders of women's human rights, have a responsibility to look more closely at the structures in place that permit gender-based violence to exist and persist. After much consultation with activists, organizations, and experts from around the world, militarism has emerged as one of the key structures that perpetuates violence.

While there are many different ways to define militarism, our working definition outlines militarism as an ideology that creates a culture of fear and supports the use of violence, aggression, or military interventions for settling disputes and enforcing economic and political interests. It is a psychology that often has grave consequences for the true safety and security of women and of society as a whole. Militarism is a distinctive way of looking at the world; it influences how we see our neighbors, our families, our public life, and other people in the world. To embrace militarism is to presume that everyone has enemies and that violence is an effective way to solve problems.

To leave militaristic ways of thinking unchallenged is to leave certain forms of masculinity privileged, to leave global hierarchies of power firmly in place, to grant impunity to wartime perpetrators of violence against women. To roll back militarism is to inspire more expansive ideas about genuine security, to bring more women into public life, to create a world built not on the competitive sale of weapons, but on authentic relations of trust and cooperation.

There is a need to address militaristic beliefs in all of our societies. Militarism has material and institutional, as well as cultural and psychological consequences that are more difficult to measure. Wars, internal conflicts, and violent repressions of political and social justice movements – all of which are a result of a culture of militarism – have a particular and often disproportionate impact on women. Rape is used as a tactic of war to drive fear and to humiliate women and their communities. But sexual violence is just one form of violence that women and girls suffer throughout the continuum of violence before, during and after conflict has ostensibly ended.

Militarism neither ends nor begins in war zones, nor does it confine itself to the public sphere. The families of militarized men and women may experience violence in their homes where ‘war crimes' and armed domestic violence are hidden from public view, and women who serve in the military are just as easily victims of sexual assault by their fellow soldiers.

Even places that are not experiencing conflict directly are not exempt from militarism: they send troops, produce and sell weapons, and invest in the militaries of foreign governments rather than supporting development efforts. These governments have skewed priorities, spending huge percentages of their budgets on the military and arms rather than on social services, such as education, health care, job security, and development that would yield real security for women.
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