Gender needs survey, UNIFEM, 2009, p.29.

On the 27th December, 2008, the Israeli military launched a major offensive against the Gaza Strip resulting in a dramatic deterioration in the lives of the civilian population already in a state of deep deprivation following an 18-month-long blockade of the Gaza Strip. According to OCHA, the 23 day war led to the death of 1,366 people, of whom 430 were children and 111 women, as well as the injury of over 5,380 people, including 1,870 children and 800 women. The Israeli military offensive also led to large-scale internal displacement of civilians, made more traumatic by the fact that civilians could neither leave the field of war, nor find secure and safe haven within it from aerial bombardment, even in United Nations installations. About 100,000 people fled their homes in UNRWA shelters. During the military offensive, public infrastructure and essential services were either completely destroyed or partly damaged resulting in lack of shelter and fuel, as well as further deterioration in water and sanitation services. These have added to the effects of the lack of access to health services, food insecurity, and general psychosocial distress suffered by the population. All Gazans are once again experiencing the loss or injury of family members, relatives and friends. Given the casualty and injury statistics – the war has left in its wake 1,800 bereaved parents, more than 800 new widows and more than 5,000 injured family members who will have to be cared for, placing additional burdens within their households.

But while identifying needs, the report makes no attempt to hold the perpetrators of the violence – the Israeli military, or Hamas for that matter – accountable for the losses in life and livelihood, and the massive ongoing needs that the report finds that are the consequence of the senseless violence. The report fails to talk about their obligations as states and governments, but rather focuses on the obligations of the international community.

Likewise, the report ‘Who Answers to Women?’ is in many ways a ground-breaking report. with five chapters: Who Answers to Women?, Politics, Services,: Markets and Justice — all very important but again it skirts around the point of state-perpetrated violence on women, as we can see very publically and starkly in Gaza, but also with oppressive state sanction against women for all sorts of reasons in some Middle East states including Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia.

The issue of human rights to a large extent has fallen off the agenda and multilateral bodies are largely hamstrung as to the extent they can criticise member states and even the extent they can raise questions on gender rights abuse and the like. It is fairly safe to refer to women representation in government, but does much less in talking about repressive and inhuman laws.

The issue the international community and UNIFEM and its allies need to address is how to bring the real issue of state violence against women squarely onto the agenda.

In particular, the 2006 report, “Delivering as One”, prepared by The Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on System-Wide Coherence, was not sparing in its critique of the gender performance by the UN:

While the UN remains a key actor in supporting countries to achieve gender equality and women’s empowerment, there is a strong sense that the UN system’s contribution has been incoherent, under-resourced and fragmented.

As part of the solution, the report called for the consolidation of the existing three UN gender institutions – UNIFEM, Division for the Advancement of Women (DAW), and Office of the Special Advisor on Gender Issues and the Advancement of Women (OSAGI). The new institution will also receive a promotion – the Executive Director of the new agency will have the rank of the Under-Secretary-General, the agency will be well-funded to do its job, and gender equality remains a mandate for everyone in the UN system.

These recommendations were well-received by the international community, particularly those in the women’s NGOs, who have long advocated for women’s rights to be given greater focus and resource by the UN.

That was in 2006. We are now half way through 2009, there is still no sign of this recommendation being translated into actual dollar figures.

This lack of action has not being overlooked. Long-time advocate for gender equality and Co-Director of AIDS-FREE World, Stephen Lewis lamented over the delayed creation of a new UN women’s agency.

The need for a new women’s agency in the UN is not just a rhetoric exercise under the name of UN Reform. Let’s take UNIFEM, the agency which has the mandate for gender equality, as an example. Currently UNIFEM is located under the organisational structure of the UNDP (UN Development Program). Administratively, this means UNDP deals with UNIFEM’s management and operations including finance. In addition to the potential administrative delays due to the “middleman” approach, UNIFEM is also charged with an administrative fee when there are financial processes to be done, such as a funding agreement. Though these administrative fees are small, for a smaller agency the cost does add up overtime.

Secondly, because UNIFEM is located under UNDP, at the country level this means it is up to each UNDP Country Director to decide whether UNIFEM can participate in high-level meetings. Given that gender is recognised as a cross-cutting issue, and most of the countries with UN presence has signed onto CEDAW, MDG, or the Beijing Platform, the presence of UNIFEM at high-level meetings to ensure gender issues are fully considered in discussions is crucial.

UNIFEM’s ambiguous status can also create complication with local partners and governments. Because not all UNIFEM office in each country are formally registered (again, courtesy of it being under UNDP) as a UN body, joint projects with governments can sometimes present difficulty as each country has different registration requirements for NGOs and multilateral entities. I recall one instance where there was a joint UNIFEM event with a partner government agency where two days before signing, there was a crisis as the agreement requires the NGO to be formally recognised by the partner government’s ministry of foreign affairs. As UNIFEM is “with” UNDP, it has no formal recognition of its own. After some brainstorming sessions, the problem was solved because the funding was co-contributed by another UN agency which has such status.

The issue at hand is not whether other UN agencies are supportive of UNIFEM’s mandate and what it has been tasked to achieve. Rather, the problem lies in why the organisational structuring has placed UNIFEM in such a position that makes it vulnerable so that negotiations, bargaining, and winning “approval” from other UN agencies may be needed before even attending a meeting.

These may seem like routine administrative process or organisational politics, but taken as a whole, it means UNIFEM spends an inordinate amount of time lobbying and building stakeholder relationships, just to make sure it can do its job. In a powerful and illuminating article written by the feminist international relation theorist, Deniz Kandiyoti observed what she calls the “patriarchal bargaining” – the nuanced process which women make on a daily basis to either have access to resources or just to survive.

It is ironic that the UN agency mandated to promote women’s equality and rights is also doing its own bargaining.

1. The continuum of sexual- and gender-based violence during both non-conflict and conflict periods has often been overlooked, where there is now a common perception perpetuated by popular media that SGBV in conflict situation is predominantly rape by military and military-like agents. At the same time, socio-political context – the status of women, gender norms and identities, to gender differences between income, political participation, literacy level, mortality and so on – during the so-called peacetime and their direct linkage to how sexual- and gender-based violence is perpetrated in wartime has been ignored.

2. It is useful to look at the plurality of masculinities and femininities and how they serve to keep patriarchal structure in operation, especially in an institution such as the military, where power and dominance is dependent upon the rigid enforcement and enactment of norms and behaviours.

3. Because the politics of representation have significant effects on the way we understand and respond, we need to maintain our feminist curiosity (following the footsteps of feminist international relations theorist, Cynthia Enloe) – and question how and why issues are represented and interpreted in a certain way and not the other.

In particular, I wanted to explore how the prevailing understanding and distinction of the private vs. public understanding about violence against women during the so-called peacetime is carried into discussions about violence against women in conflict and post-conflict situation. This distinction is played out in the prioritisation of different forms of sexual violence, where military-perpetrated forms of sexual violence takes precedence, as demonstrated in wider media attention as well as the rhetoric of aid agencies and donors.

However, to do so is to ignore the continuum of violence against women where women experience violence (both physical and non-physical such as emotional and economic abuse) at different levels by different groups of people.  This is the pre-condition upon which military-based SGBV is so effective in damaging a community, and which is why SGBV has been – whether clearly stated or as part of unspoken institutional culture – used as a military strategy.

Distinctions are useful in the sense that they construct differences for a specific political agenda and as result, alienate and compartmentalise the issues. However, if we understand the issue from a radical feminist perspective, we can see oppression as a continuum, in which variations of gender dominance underpin the power structure of patriarchy. In this sense, seeing gender on a spectrum enables us to identify commonality and opportunity for mobilisation and social change.

Joyce Wu can be contacted at joyce.wu (at) anu.edu.au.

It is widely acknowledged that security sector reform (SSR) is an essential part of the peace-building process in post-conflict situation. In particular, the integration of gender into SSR is crucial in reducing sexual and gender-based violence especially towards women and girls; to think through a “gendered lens” on what “security means for women and girls, because it usually means something very different from the traditional understanding of international relations theory; and how male dominance reinforces and perpetuates gendered vulnerabilities. INSTRAW’s training manuals and guides, therefore, are a timely response in this process of re-conceptualising “security”.

However, without a feminist understanding of what is gender and why promoting gender equality is important in development, a risk with these manuals and guides is the danger of assuming gender is a “fix it” tool, something one whips out of the development kit to solve operational issues, streamline programmatic responses, or donor compliance. The integration of gender into security sector reform may also risk taking certain things for granted, such as the assumption that by reforming the security sector, women will benefit from the trickle-down effect, as opposed to asking the harder questions which feminists have been raising: whether an institution (i.e. the military) which legitimises the use of violence can be made user-friendly? So the use INSTRAW’s training manuals and guides is to be encouraged but with the caveat that they are not a fix-it tool but a starting point to much more important discussion on more fundamental issues of secutry and gender based violence, which these manuals cannot address.

Security Sector Reform (SSR) is increasingly prioritized by governments, and on the agenda of international development, peace and security communities. SSR opens a window of possibility to transform security policies, institutions and programmes, creating opportunites to integrate gender issues.

The integration of gender issues is being recognised as a key to operational effectiveness, local ownership and strengthening oversight. For example, increasing the recruitment of female staff, preventing human rights violations, and collaborating with women’s organisations contribute to creating an an efficient accountable and participatory security sector, which responds to the specific needs of men, women, girls and boys.

Despite the recognition of the importance of integrating gender issues in SSR, there has been a lack of resources on the topic. This toolkit is an initial response to the need for information and analysis on gender and SSR, It is designed to provide policy makers and practicioners with a practical introduction to why gender issues are important in SSR and what can be done to integrate them.

Each SSR context is unique. As such, the strategies and recommendations provided in the Toolkit may not always be directly applicable, and should always be adapted to the local context.

The 12 Tools and corresponding Practice notes can be downloaded here.