Source: Sudan Vision
This part is from a report “Ending Violence against Women: A Challenge for Development”, the report was written by Francine Pickup with Suzanne Williams and Caroline Sweetman and published by OXFAM GB.

 Since International Women’s Year in 1975, international and national development organizations of all kinds have focused on women in many different ways. An early interest in ‘integrating’ women into development led to ‘women in development’ (WID) and later, ‘gender and development’ (GAD) programmes and projects. In order to analyze the ways in which development organizations had worked with women, Caroline Moser (1989b) created a typology distinguishing between five different policy approaches: welfare, equity, anti-poverty, efficiency, and empowerment. Development organizations have tended to under-emphasize the feminist goal of promoting equality between women and men in favor of the goal of poverty alleviation. Most development interventions focusing on women or on gender issues do not aim to challenge gender power relations or shift unequal workloads from women to men; rather, they aim to encourage women in production. Few development organizations have been willing to consider working on interventions that aim to get men to undertake reproductive work, or to challenge violence within the family or household.

Reluctance on the part of development organizations to address violence against women is likely to be due to a range of concerns, many of which are dealt with at more length in Chapter 2. These include fear of intervening in the ‘private sphere’ of the family and household, and concern about being charged with breaking up the family, or interfering with the institution of marriage. More pragmatic concerns include the concern that misplaced interventions may leave women more vulnerable to violence through empowerment strategies that encourage women to step out of culturally ascribed gender roles. There is indeed evidence of a link between economic and social change, shocks to gender power relations, and increased violence against women, which should not be ignored. This will be examined in more detail later in this chapter.

Our analysis of violence against women shows that we cannot sustain a vision of poverty as separate from equality. Poverty affects individuals differently according to their gender, and other aspects of their identity.

Women who struggle to live free from violence speak of economic deprivation, but also of social and political dimensions, including their exclusion from participation in society, their lack of self-esteem, and their sense that they lack autonomy. Living in poverty makes women particularly vulnerable to male violence against them. Economic need may compel women to accept income-generating strategies that make then vulnerable to violence. In societies where women are seen as contravening gender norms by leaving their homes, women who work outside the home for pay are particularly likely to encounter such violence.

In Bangladesh, women who have to leave home because they cannot afford to obey demands that they remain in purdah (seclusion) in the home are vulnerable to harassment, abuse, and violence from men, because they are perceived as transgressing the norms of female decency. In contexts of extreme economic crisis, women may place themselves at appalling risk by undertaking work that is a form of violence in itself.

For example, women of the former Soviet Union who are trafficked for sex work, may do this out of desperation to reach countries where work is rumored to be available but legal immigration is not an option. Research by the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences, reiterates a finding already known by many human rights activists in the United States, namely that the vast majority of women in prison are there for drugs smuggling. These women are paid to use their bodies to smuggle drugs; many are coerced by their families, who are offered considerable financial rewards by drug traffickers.

Some grassroots organizations are responding to poor women who face violence in the ‘public sphere’. The Israeli Coalition against Trafficking of Women, in conjunction with other NGOs, including the Israeli Women’s Network and Amnesty International, successfully lobbied the Israeli Parliament to amend the Penal Code so that traffickers who traded in people for the purposes of prostitution would be brought to justice. The maximum penalty for this is now set at 16 years.

The Pakistan gender programme of the UNDP, recognizing the link between violence against women, women’s low status, and development, has worked on several concrete areas with the Pakistani government such as women’s mobility, social and economic empowerment, access to credit, negative portrayals of women in the media, and enterprise development for rural women. However, none of its projects directly addresses the prevention of violence against women, facilitates women’s access to justice, or the improvement of the State’s response to violence against women.

The Well-Being Centre in Kenya, which seeks to rehabilitate street children, focuses specifically on young girls who live on the street between the ages of six and 18, by providing them with basic needs, and educational and training opportunities. The Centre recognises that the street girls face additional threats not experienced to the same extent by boys, largely because girls are more vulnerable and face a higher frequency of sexual abuse and physical violence. In Central Africa, economic crisis, displacement, and insecurity have rendered many women vulnerable to sexual violence and/or in a position of having to resort to prostitution as a means of supporting their families and dependants. In response to this trend, a Reproductive Health Programme in Central Africa has been developed to collect data on Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs) with a view to designing a programme to provide access to diagnostic, treatment, and prevention services.