Gender-based violence

“ Recognising the structural nature of violence against women as gender-based violence, and that violence against women is one of the crucial social mechanisms by which women are forced into a subordinate position compared with men ”

“ Freedom from torture and inhuman or degrading treatment
No one may be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. For the sake of clarity, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment includes gender-based violence. ”

“ Today's majority, however, finds no significance whatever in the state support for the Act based upon the States' acknowledged failure to deal adequately with gender-based violence in state courts, and the belief of their own law enforcement agencies that national action is essential. ”

“ Addressing gender-based violence in all its forms – from domestic violence, to genital cutting, to early and forced marriage – that needs to be on our agenda too. Because girls around the world deserve so much better – they are so eager to learn...and so many of them are sacrificing so much for the chance to get an education. ”

“ These measures helped to create an enabling environment for human rights violations to occur, including disappearances, unlawful killings and torture, which have gone largely unpunished, despite formal legal and constitutional protections against such abuses.12 Gender-based violence, including rape, sexual harassment and sexual exploitation, has also occurred despite legal protection. ”

“ A government-wide approach to gender policy means that every agency and every policy team is at the table, and that every issue is approached with gender equity in mind. We’ll work closely with the Office on Violence Against Women at the Department of Justice to end gender-based violence against women, girls, and LGBTQ+ people ”

“ Equally important, though, gender-based violence in the 1990's was shown to operate in a manner similar to racial discrimination in the 1960's in reducing the mobility of employees and their production and consumption of goods shipped in interstate commerce. Like racial discrimination, " [g] ender-based violence bars its most likely targets-women-from full partic [ipation] in the national economy." ”

“ That intersection is central to the President’s executive order establishing the White House Gender Policy Council, which considers the interwoven components of racial equity in its plans to advance gender equity and equality and develop a government-wide approach to ending gender-based violence, both domestically and globally. ”

“ Supports the regional initiatives on the issue of gender related violence in armed conflict to influence regional and local decision makers, aimed at the implementation of the commitments of the Kampala Declaration addressing impunity for gender based crimes at the country level and to improve women’s visibility, empowerment and resilience ”

“ Based on the data thus partially summarized, Congress found that
"crimes of violence motivated by gender have a substantial adverse effect on interstate commerce, by deterring potential victims from traveling interstate, from engaging in employment in interstate business, and from transacting with business, and in places involved, in interstate commerce ... ”

“ It is true that these data relate to the effects of violence against women generally, while the civil rights remedy limits its scope to "crimes of violence motivated by gender"-presumably a somewhat narrower subset of acts. ”

“ The Federal Government's argument, however, is that Congress used §5 to remedy the actions of state actors, namely, those States which, through discriminatory design or the discriminatory conduct of their officials, failed to provide adequate (or any) state remedies for women injured by gender-motivated violence-a failure that the States, and Congress, documented in depth. ”

“ But it is wrong, inexcusably wrong, on the part of women, whose experience of life ought to have proved to them that for women to invite physical force against themselves is to provoke all the forces of reaction against which their movement is, in reality, directed. Long years ago, men threw stones and filth at women who asked for enfranchisement. Gradually public opinion killed out this hooliganism. Then came the militants, and, bysmashing windows and arson and general terrorism, revived the ape in men, so that, for some years past, all women are once more in danger of violence from men. ”

“ Feminism [16] had acquired in public opinion in the course of a generation, for no proposal was made at the same time to abolish the punishment of flogging so far as men were concerned. Up to this time the criminal law of England, as of other countries, made no distinction whatever between the sexes in the matter of crime and punishment, or at least no distinction based on the principle or sentiment of sex privilege. (A slight exception might be made, perhaps, in the crime of “petty treason,” which distinguished the murder of a husband by his wife from other cases of homicide.) ”

“ Just as we must support the desire for freedom and the battles that, in some countries, from Afghanistan to Iran, women are carrying on with courage and determination and to reclaim their role in society.
Unfortunately, even in Italy the picture remains worrying and requires the utmost attention from the institutions. Feminicide is the final act of violence against women. It is the extreme form of the most brutal and most evident violence, the physical one, which has many possible ways of exercising: from threats to persecution, from mistreatment to rapes. ”

“ As the 1993 Senate Report put it, "The Violence Against Women Act is intended to respond both to the underlying attitude that this violence is somehow less serious than other crime and to the resulting failure of our criminal justice system to address such violence. ”

“ Why is it that men's blood-shedding militancy is applauded and women's symbolic militancy punished with a prison cell and the forcible feeding horror? It means simply this, that men's double standard of sex morals, whereby the victims of their lust are counted as outcasts, while the men themselves escape all social censure, really applies to morals in all departments of life. Men make the moral code and they expect women to accept it. ”

“ Its provisions include allocution rights for victims of violent crime and sexual abuse, truth in sentencing guidelines to ensure that violent offenders serve longer sentences, and sex offender registries designed to monitor offenders more effectively. This Act will help put 100,000 more police officers on the streets of our communities. And the landmark Violence Against Women Act is the first comprehensive Federal effort to address violence against women. ”

“ The law which the militant suffragist has violated is among the ordinances of that code which forbade us even to think of employing our native Indian troops against the Boers; which brands it as an ignominy when a man leaves his fellow in the lurch and saves his own life; and which makes it an outrage for a man to do violence to a woman. ”

“ They do not realise that the question is not of the physical strength of women as women, but of the whole forces of the State [168] being at the disposal of women to set in motion to gratify their whims and passions. The idea of a sex war in which women take the field against men, such as represents the inwardness of the whole Feminist Movement of to-day, seems to them ridiculous. ”

“ In all crimes requiring a certain amount of brute strength, such as burglary, robbery with violence, and so on, the proportion of women to men is small. A woman very rarely possesses the animal force requisite for the perpetration of crimes accompanied with much personal violence. But where the element of personal violence does not come conspicuously to the front the proportion of female criminals to male immediately rises, and in such crimes as poisoning, child murder, abortion, domestic theft, women are more criminally disposed than men. ”

“ Men with foam on their moustaches were gripping women by the breasts, tearing open their clothing, and proceeding to rabid indecencies. Or, if not sex-mad, they twisted their arms, turned back their thumbs to dislocation, rained blows with fists on pale faces, covering them with blood. They tore out golden hair or thin grey locks with equal disregard. Mounted police were summoned to overawe the crowd, which by this time whether suffragist and female, or neutral, non-committal and male, was giving the police on foot a very nasty time. ”

“ If we realize this we can understand why it is that a group of women who, even in the effort to support a good cause, revert to the crude method of violence are committing a double wrong. They are wronging their own sex by proving false to its best traditions, and they are wronging civilization by attempting to revive methods of savagery which it is civilization's mission to repress. Therefore it may fairly be held that even if the methods of the suffragettes were really adequate to secure women's suffrage, the attainment of the franchise by those methods would be a misfortune. ”

“ Give men reasonable justice as against women, cease to trample underfoot every principle of equity and fair play at the behest of feminist shrieks, and the excuse, or at least, palliation which now undoubtedly exists for any sporadic brutality on the part of men, and especially husbands, of which women may be the victims, would be done away with. ”

“ Of course, this whole talk of "political offences," when they are, on the face of them, mere common crimes, is purely and simply a trick designed to shield the cowardly and contemptible female creatures who perpetrate these senseless and dastardly outrages from the punishment they deserve and would receive if they had not the good fortune to be of the privileged sex. In the case of men this impudent nonsense would, of course, never have been put forward, and, if it had, would have been summarily laughed out of court. ”

“ Best practices ensure that gender-based violations are an integral part of the inquiry and that the voices and experiences of women victims are heard, whether the mandate expressly incorporates gender, as did commission mandates in Haiti, Sierra Leone and Timor-Leste, or whether the mandates were gender neutral, as were commission mandates for commissions in Guatemala, Peru and South Africa. ”

“ There is a queer kind of apologist for brutality, who suggests that " men are so," and that nothing better need ever be expected of them, thereby showing himself blind to all the improvements which knowledge and intelligence have already made in men's treatment of women. Does it not matter to men that women should be injured? To read a recent volume, entitled Sex Antagonism, by Walter Heape, F.R.S., one would indeed suppose that it did not. ”