Analysis of Gender-based Violence in the Context of the Sustainable Development Goals

Pilar Guaita-Fernández, José María Martín Martín, Samuel Ribeiro Navarrete, Rosa Puertas
Sustainable Development (Early review)

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Abstract:

Through the 2030 Agenda, international bodies have set out 17 highly interconnected Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to set course for the equitable and just development of society. SDG5 seeks to empower women and girls as a way of guaranteeing their fundamental rights, which are sometimes violated by the physical superiority of men who exercise their power by undermining women's freedoms. This study aims to analyse the connection between SDG1, SDG3, SDG8 and SDG11, and the protection of women, identifying the lines of action needed to favour access to justice for victims of gender-based violence. The study was carried out on a panel sample of the 17 Spanish Autonomous Regions over a decade (2012–2021), using the generalised method of moments, specifically the xtabond2 estimator. Development was carried out in two stages: (1) the measures implemented by the Spanish authorities and the quality of life of the population were analysed, (2) six representative dimensions of quality of life associated with different targets of the SDGs were studied. Both scenarios were designed with the common objective of determining their impact on reporting to the police. The results show the need to reinforce protection orders, as well as to put in place the necessary measures to improve women's quality of life in order to attain a violence-free society. Specifically, education, economic stability, mental and physical health, and work must be enhanced. In short, socio-economic policies should be oriented towards the creation of a climate of security that favours access to justice for battered women.

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Sustainable Development Goals and Gender Equality: A Social Design Approach on Gender-Based Violence

Raquel Lima, Graça Guedes
Sustainability (Basel, Switzerland), 2024-01, Vol.16 (2), p.91

 

Abstract:

Gender equality is a central human aspect of the Sustainable Development Goals. Among its multiple and complex issues, this research highlights gender-based violence as a domain that affects women’s empowerment and the guarantees of an effective equality on numerous levels. To address such a complex structure, which perpetuates inequalities between men and women, generating multiple effects and jeopardising social changes, social design can provide contributions on cultural and social levels. To achieve social systemic changes, one needs to activate profound cultural transformations. Thus, how can we change culture without rejecting the need to empower women and promote equality? The Montréal Design Declaration (2017) recognised social design’s potential to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), to contribute to global challenges, and to accept a calling for stakeholders’ integration and agency promotion. This review explores how social design can provide contributions with regard to SDG5 and gender-based violence, presenting relevant domains that actively contribute to cultural transformation to address interventions in this systemic phenomenon.

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Gender-Based Violence in the Global South: Ideologies, Resistances, Responses, and Transformations

Editor: Ramona Biholar, Dacia L. Leslie

February 26, 2024, Routledge

 

Abstract:

This book brings together a diverse range of scholars and practitioners working at the nexus of peace and development to reflect, at the mid-way point of the Sustainable Development Goals implementation period, what impact Goal 16 has made, or may yet make, toward reducing violence in ‘all its forms. Adopted in 2015, the Sustainable Development Goals include 17 objectives designed to shape and direct the global development agenda through to 2030, with Goal 16 aiming to promote ‘peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development.’ Amidst an ongoing global pandemic, evidence of a fracturing liberal international order, and the persistence of seemingly intractable conflict in large parts of the world, this volume takes stock of current progress toward providing access to justice and ensuring inclusive and democratic institutions. Across 15 chapters, the book’s contributors explore the universal aspirations of Goal 16 and its specific implications for conflict-affected states, which continue to experience ‘development in reverse,’ and for historically marginalized groups such as women, youth, the disabled, and indigenous peoples. In doing so, it offers a comprehensive assessment of Goal 16’s broader contribution to the creation of a more just, peaceful world against the realities of societies emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic and grappling with a deepening climate crisis.

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Sustainable Development Goal 16 and the Global Governance of Violence: Critical Reflections on the Uncertain Future of Peace

Editor: Timothy Donais, Alistair D. Edgar, Kirsten Van Houten
August 9, 2023, Routledge

 

Abstract:

This book brings together a diverse range of scholars and practitioners working at the nexus of peace and development to reflect, at the mid-way point of the Sustainable Development Goals implementation period, what impact Goal 16 has made, or may yet make, toward reducing violence in ‘all its forms. Adopted in 2015, the Sustainable Development Goals include 17 objectives designed to shape and direct the global development agenda through to 2030, with Goal 16 aiming to promote ‘peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development.’ Amidst an ongoing global pandemic, evidence of a fracturing liberal international order, and the persistence of seemingly intractable conflict in large parts of the world, this volume takes stock of current progress toward providing access to justice and ensuring inclusive and democratic institutions. Across 15 chapters, the book’s contributors explore the universal aspirations of Goal 16 and its specific implications for conflict-affected states, which continue to experience ‘development in reverse,’ and for historically marginalized groups such as women, youth, the disabled, and indigenous peoples. In doing so, it offers a comprehensive assessment of Goal 16’s broader contribution to the creation of a more just, peaceful world against the realities of societies emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic and grappling with a deepening climate crisis.

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Safe at home? Examining the extension of criminal penalties for marital rape in cross-national context, 1979–2013

Andrew P. Davis, Morgan Johnstonbaugh

March 27, 2024, Cambridge University Press (Online)

 

Abstract:

While sociologists have focused on the national adoption of public-sphere women’s rights such as the right to vote in elections or participate fully in economic matters, less work has examined the diffusion of private-sphere women’s rights, rights of women in the home. We address this gap by examining the cross-national adoption of laws that criminalize marital rape. Building on prior research that finds that women’s rights organizations and women’s rights focused treaties, we explore the cross-national determinants of the criminalization of marital rape. Using an event history analysis covering 131 countries from 1979 to 2013, we find support for the global institutionalist framework that contends that socialization into the global system and direct advocacy efforts of global organizations contribute to faster rates of criminalization of marital rape. Further, we suggest that these global institutionalist processes become amplified when they are focused by events that set the agenda for international organizations. Implications for world-society scholarship on the global adoption of women’s rights are further discussed.

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The Limits of Consent: Sexual Assault and Affirmative Consent

Lisa Featherstone, Cassandra Byrnes, Jenny Maturi, Kiara Minto, Renée Mickelburgh, Paige Donaghy
November 12, 2023, Palgrave MacMilla

 

Abstract:

This open access book examines the ways that consent operates in contemporary culture, suggesting it is a useful starting point to respectful relationships. This work, however, seeks to delve deeper, into the more complicated aspects of sexual consent. It examines the ways meaningful consent is difficult, if not impossible, in relationships that involve intimate partner violence or family violence. It considers the way vulnerable communities need access to information on consent. It highlights the difficulties of consent and reproductive rights, including the use (and abuse) of contraception and abortion. Finally, it considers the ways that young women are reshaping narratives of sexual assault and consent, as active agents both online and offline. Though this work considers victimisation, it also pays careful attention to the ways vulnerable groups take up their rights and understand and practice consent in meaningful ways.

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New Directions in Sexual Violence Scholarship: Law, Power and Chang

Editor: Kate Gleeson, Yvette Russell
May 30, 2023, Routledge

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Abstract:

This edited collection brings together leading and emerging scholars in the important field of sexual violence scholarship. The last ten years have witnessed an international reckoning on sexual violence, typified in the mainstream imagination by the #MeToo movement, acknowledgement of the violence of university campus life, and the overdue recognition of the enduring harms of child sexual abuse. While the state has been forced to respond through law and other political processes, at times revealing its agility and at other times its archaic investment in the past, much of the real work responding to sexual violence and abuse has taken place within communities, and in the personal responses of the individuals writing the scripts of their experiences. This volume explores the nuances of these individual experiences and considers how they are shaped and reflected by intersecting axes of power including gender, race, class, age and able-bodied status. It reflects on law and law reform in the area and suggests new modes and frames through which to explain and understand sexual violence and institutional responses to it. Debates within this contested personal and political arena do not map onto longstanding binaries of liberal and radical feminism, nor conservative and progressive politics. This interdisciplinary volume traces that murky terrain and features some of the leading international scholars writing on sexual violence in English today.

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China’s Pragmatic Approach to International Human Rights Law

Sida Liu, Yun Xian, Sitao Li
UC Irvine Journal of International, Transnational, and Comparative Law, Volume 9 (2024), Forthcoming

 

Abstract:

This article argues that China has adopted a pragmatic approach to international human rights law in the early 21st century, characterized by three main features: (1) pragmatic experimentation in the appropriation and modification of human rights norms; (2) selective decoupling of international and domestic human rights rules; and (3) divergent enforcement in the legislative and practical responses to various human rights issue areas. Contrasting the normative approach of the United States, which closely links human rights to democracy and the rule of law, China’s pragmatic approach is defined not only by the prioritization of social and economic rights over civil and political rights, as frequently shown by its critics, but also by the flexible applications of human rights rules in its lawmaking and enforcement. This approach permits significant gaps between “law on the books” and “law in action,” as well as between domestic rules and international law.

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論"受虐婦女綜合症"的意義、局限及其在中國的接受 ——一個比較法的視角

郭曉飛，中國政法大學法學院
婦女研究論叢，2023年第6期

 

摘要:

本文通過對美國"受虐婦女綜合症"的分析,認為這個概念主要被用來打破陪審團關於性別與親密關係的刻板印象,用來證明被告合理確信自己面對緊迫的危險,需要進行自身防衛.它並沒有顛覆傳統法律教義,只是在既有的防衛學說中納入性別視角.同時,"受虐婦女綜合症"在事實維度上面臨科學視角的批評,在價值維度上面臨女性主義的批評.本文認為,中國需要進行批判性有選擇的借鑒.儘管中國在規範中並沒有出現"受虐婦女綜合症"這一概念,但無論是在實體法領域,還是在證據法領域,事實上已經部分接受了這一理論在刑事司法中的適用.中國應該用"受虐婦女社會調查報告"來代替"受虐婦女綜合症",這不但可以去除美國概念中的病理化效應,也可以更加全面的認識這一現象的複雜性,同時也與我國刑訴法中既有的"未成年人社會調查報告"具有一致性。