KEY POINTS:
Can you imagine a world without violence against women?
When Amnesty International asked people this question, one of the most common replies from males was "I could walk down the street at night without women fearing me as a threat to their safety".
Typical female responses ranged from "I could walk home by myself after a night out" to "my home would be a haven of safety, not fear".
Violence against women affects not only women, but also the way men are perceived by women. The fear of violence is factored into everyday choices which women make: what time to go home at night, what route to take, whether to stay at home alone.
Violence - whether in the home or in the community - is an all-pervasive reality that directly or indirectly affects the everyday lives of women across the world.
Statistics show that over a lifetime, one in three women will be beaten, coerced into sex or abused. In New Zealand, over 34 per cent of women aged between 18 and 64 have experienced at least one act of physical or sexual assault from a partner. And over half of all murders in this country are domestic-related.
In response to alarming figures such as these, Amnesty International launched a global Stop Violence Against Women campaign in 2004. While abhorring the use of violence against any person, Amnesty International is concentrating on violence against women because of the vast scale of the problem and its absence, until recently, from the human rights agenda.
The Stop Violence Against Women campaign focuses on violence against women in conflict, community and family situations. It emphasises violence against women as a human rights abuse that reflects wider social and economic inequalities and cuts across cultural and socio-economic divisions to affect women from all walks of life.
Not only is violence against women a human rights abuse in itself, but it is the fear or threat of violence that prevents other human rights from being realised.
Countries are obliged under international human rights standards to hold perpetrators of violence against women - whether private individuals or state actors - accountable.
"It is clearly a government's responsibility to legislate and implement laws and programmes to prevent and punish the crime of violence against women," says Ced Simpson, the New Zealand Executive Director of Amnesty International. "Failure to do so constitutes a violation of international human rights law".
In New Zealand, as newspaper headlines remind us, incidents of violence against women are most common in a domestic context. While studies such as the two carried out by Professor Fergusson and Associate Professor Poulton (reported in the Herald this month) demonstrate that domestic violence is perpetrated by both males and females, statistics show that in the most serious cases the victims are predominantly women and children.
Over a six-week period last summer, six women were killed by their partners or former partners while over December and January, incidents of domestic violence occurred every eight minutes and were witnessed by about 6000 children, more than half of whom were under 5. New Zealand's Domestic Violence Act of 1995 is considered to be a progressive piece of legislation that sets a benchmark for other countries. Yet as these statistics show, domestic violence levels in this country remain unacceptably high.
Judge Peter Boshier of the Family Court suggests that to effect real change in domestic violence levels we need to change our culture: "Change cannot be undertaken simply by central government. We as a community need to own the problem and look at how we will bring about change."
The present 16 Days of Activism to Stop Violence Against Women gives New Zealanders the opportunity to contribute to the cultural change necessary to reduce levels of domestic violence.
The 16 Days of Activism, which started on Saturday and end on International Human Rights Day on December 10, is a worldwide event which allows people to stand up and speak out against violence towards women in all its forms.
Organisations such as the Families Commission, Unifem and Amnesty International are encouraging everyone - men, women and children - to demonstrate their support by wearing a white ribbon, a symbol of hope for a world in which women and girls can live free from the experience and fear of violence and a challenge to the culture of acceptability that surrounds violence against women.
Many other activities and events will be held over the 16 Days of Activism, giving every New Zealander the opportunity not only to imagine a world without violence against women, but also to act for one.
* For more information on the Stop Violence Against Women campaign see: www.standbyme.org.nz
* Mary Llewellyn-Fowler is a writer for Amnesty International New Zealand.
