Violence Against Women
This chapter is from a book “Ending Violence against Women: A Challenge for Development,” the book was written by Francine Pickup with Suzanne Williams and Caroline Sweetman and published by Oxfam GB.
Power, ‘empowerment’, and violence against women
Many of the organisations and women’s groups that tackle violence against women as an issue of strategic interest to women start from the premise that the most appropriate way to do this is to support the empowerment of women, to enable them to overcome the economic, social, and political barriers to equality with men, to challenge existing power relations, and thereby realise their human rights. At the outset, it is worth stating that development policy-makers and practitioners need to be modest about what their interventions are likely to achieve for women who face violence, for two reasons. Violence against women is the outcome of unequal power between women and men, and is therefore concerned with relationships, rather than with women as individuals. Many development interventions that aim to bring about changes in gender relations still tend to focus most of their attention on women (although there are some notable exceptions, some of which feature in later chapters of this book). Secondly, change brought about by development interventions is only a tiny part of wider social, economic, and political change.
Many of the development interventions that use the term ‘women’s empowerment’ do so very loosely. Around the time of the Third United Nations Women’s Conference (held in Nairobi in 1985), the term entered common usage in development organisations of all kinds, regardless of the very wide range of philosophical standpoints that informed their work. Inevitably, this difference in standpoints prevented many of them from adopting the radical agenda of women’s empowerment.
Caroline Moser’s (1989b) WID/GAD matrix – a loosely historical typology of policy approaches to women and development – includes empowerment as the last of five policy approaches to be developed. Moser distinguishes between five different approaches to development with women:
- Welfare: this approach is characterised by development interventions that further the goal of women’s welfare by focusing on the practical needs of women, in their conventional roles as wives and mothers. The approach, which predates the UN Decade for Women (1976-85), is politically conservative, understanding women to be passive beneficiaries of development activities. A project on violence against women informed by this approach might focus on ending violence because of the detrimental impact it has on women’s health.
- Equity: this approach is characterised by development interventions that further the goal of equity (fair treatment in the eyes of the law) between women and men. This is a politically radical approach, developed in the UN Decade for Women (1976-85), which has, as a result, not proved popular with mainstream organisations involved in development, including governments. It has also been criticised as a western, ‘top-down’ approach. Responses to ending violence against women from legal institutions and human rights organizations (discussed in depth in Chapter 2) are informed by this approach.
- Anti-poverty: this approach is characterised by development interventions that understand women to be disproportionately represented among the poor, and aim to move women and their dependants out of poverty by increasing their role in production. This approach focuses on economic poverty, and as such is unlikely to address violence against women directly. An intervention may be based on the adverse impact of violence on an individual woman’s ability to earn money for household survival, or on the impact on women’s ability to escape poverty through access to markets or productive assets. It does not address the inequitable gender relations of production within the household.
- Efficiency: this approach is characterised by development interventions that understand economic development to be hampered by inefficient working relations between women and men. In this view, governments and development agencies should create conditions in which women’s potential for economic production can be exploited to the full. This approach has been the most popular with mainstream development organisations, including governments. It might result in a development intervention that justifies work to end violence against women in terms of the costs of that violence to the public health system, or in terms of the amount of women’s labour lost as a result of violence. This approach is often seen as diametrically opposed to approaches that focus on women’s empowerment as an end in its own right.
- Empowerment: this approach is characterised by development interventions that understand human development as concerned with justice, peace, and equality, as well as economic growth. It has been developed by southern women, and critiques the current model of global development from a race, as well as a gender, perspective. It emphasizes women’s potential for self-reliance, and the importance of grassroots mobilization to effect changes in power relations in favour of women and the South. Because empowerment is, by definition, self generated, the role of development organisations is to provide women with support to enable them to transform their own lives. A project that addresses violence against women through an empowerment approach would focus on building women’s self-esteem and capacity to protect themselves from violence, and their ability to challenge oppressive gender relations and end violence throughout their community.
Examining power and empowerment
Both power and empowerment are contested terms, understood in different ways by different individuals and institutions. Various theoretical perspectives on power are available to development policy-makers and practitioners. These are potentially helpful in understanding how women endure, survive, and overcome violence and abuse, and in considering what social, political, and economic changes are needed to create equality between women and men at all levels of society.
The notion of ‘power to’ focuses on the needs of individuals to be at liberty to make decisions, to express themselves, or to earn an income and be economically independent. In contrast, ‘power over’ refers to power possessed by some people to the detriment of others. Those who have ‘power over’ others may be able to control the actions, thoughts, and beliefs of those others, with the result that those who are being dominated consider the situation as ‘natural’, or ordained by religion or culture. In this view, power is a scarce resource, and is possessed by some to the detriment of others. Men’s power over women emanates from beliefs about gender relations that accord men control over women’s bodies, behaviour, mobility, access to material resources, and labour. Men’s power over women can be overt – expressed as violence and physical coercion – or may be more subtle, influencing women’s psychological processes in such a way as to restrict the range of options that they perceive to be open to them. The power exercised over a woman by a violent man may cause a woman to internalise her oppression. For example, a woman who is subjected to abuse when she expresses her own opinions may start to withhold her opinions, and eventually believe she has none. This restricts women’s ‘power to’.
