Real men don’t hit women

Ending the pandemic of violence against women and girls in Papua New Guinea and throughout the Pacific

By TEVITA SERUILUMI
LAST week, March 8 was International Women’s Day, a day that draws global attention to the ongoing struggle for gender equality.
One of the greatest obstacles toward equality for women is men’s violence against women and girls – a widespread human rights violation, globally, and here in our region, including Papua New Guinea.
Globally, one in three women has been beaten or assaulted in her lifetime.
This statistic does not include sexual harassment, sexual violence by someone other than an intimate partner, and other forms of violence against women.
Rape remains a widespread and underreported issue in every nation. On average, more than 133 women or girls are killed every day by someone in their own family.
Every year, 12 million girls under the age of 18 are married.
Violence against women, killing of women, including sorcery-related accusation violence, as a part of cultural or traditional practice, and intimate partner homicide, are prevalent in many countries. Sex and labor trafficking remains rife. Moreover, women and girls are subjected to new and evolving forms of violence, most notably technology-based violence.
United Nations Women recently reported that “no country is within reach of eradicating intimate partner violence” and, that, we are “failing women and girls”.
Here in the Pacific, two in every three women experience intimate partner violence.
While the rates of men’s violence against women are high, resourcing women’s and survivors’ services as well as holding perpetrators accountable for their crimes under the law is low. We have progressed in our efforts to address men’s violence against women and girls, in relation to establishing women’s and survivor services, legal reform, institutional training and improving State responses and resourcing in the Pacific.
After Pacific states ratified the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (Cedaw) Convention, changes to our legal frameworks were made.
However, the legal framework on ending violence against women and girls needs strengthening, including implementation and enforcement of the law to protect women and girls.
This limitation across the Pacific region compounds and prolongs the consequences of violence, not only for women and girls as survivors but also for Pacific governments and their economies.
For one Pacific country, Fiji, it is estimated that State response for domestic violence alone cost up to 6.6 per cent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product.
In Australia, an average of one woman per week is murdered by her partner. The impact to victims, the human cost, and the economic cost is unaffordable.
The good news is that we can change this. I am part of an effort to create a legally-binding instrument at the global level to eradicate violence against women and girls.
The best option is a new optional protocol on violence against women and girls connected to Cedaw. This means there would be an additional protocol attached to the Cedaw Convention that creates commitments and obligations for our governments, specific to violence against women and girls.
The optional protocol, once ratified is a binding a treaty and would set global standards and expectations that help drive change globally, regionally and at the national level. These changes make a meaningful difference and impact for women who experience men’s violence and accountability against perpetrators will be strengthened.
Cedaw is the world’s leading treaty on women’s rights, making it an ideal home for a new optional protocol. As one of the most widely-ratified UN conventions in the world (189 nations), it can help facilitate states to ratify a new protocol. Additionally, the baseline reference for an optional protocol already exists in Cedaw General Recommendation 35 on violence against women and girls.
A new optional protocol would set minimum standards for State obligations to strengthen protections on violence against women and girls domestically and facilitate oversight and accountability globally. The protocol would include interventions proven to lower rates of violence, including:

1. LEGAL reform – Adopt laws prohibiting all forms of violence against women and girls.
2. TRAINING and accountability – For law enforcement – including police, prosecutors, lawyers, judges and health professionals on the problem, their responsibilities as representatives of the State, and protocols for action.
3.  PREVENTION education. Early education in schools and communities for boys and girls and young women and men to teach gender equality and non-violence in relationship early to prevent violence later as well as education for women and men to change their behaviors. Global guidance will be given to consider different types of prevention, especially in low resourced and high prevalence countries.
4. SURVIVOR services – Safe Houses and other crisis and support services for survivors, comprehensive medical treatment, and financial support for survivors seeking refuge and justice from violence.
5. FUNDING – Provide adequate resources to implement these interventions.

Our coalition, Every Woman Treaty, is not the only group calling for a new optional protocol. The current UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, and her two predecessors have issued a joint statement calling for this new instrument.
Four nations – Antigua and Barbuda, Costa Rica, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sierra Leone – are championing this cause among UN member States.
The opportunity is there for the Pacific to be part of this global effort.
In some parts of the world, regional mechanisms are working to address the problem, but they leave nearly 75 per cent of the world’s women and girls without a binding framework guiding their government to enhance the protection mechanisms domestically.
This includes legal frameworks that hold perpetrators accountable through effective investigation and prosecution of crimes when violence against women and girls occurs.
We must come together to enact a new optional protocol to Cedaw to end violence against women and girls.
Treaties show the world our commitment to upholding norms and standards that, in this case, promote gender equality and ending men’s violence against women into a binding framework. This framework helps guide our governments on how to effectively prevent and respond to men’s violence against women.
Treaties prioritise an issue globally, regionally and nationally. Pacific women and girls have a right and deserve to live lives that are safe and free from men’s violence.
Our governments have acted but there is a long road ahead to create Pacific families, communities and countries where women are equal and safe.
A new optional protocol on violence against women and girls is part of this journey to a safer world for women and girls that will guide our governments in the future. Given the scarceness of technical expertise on legal frameworks on violence against women, the optional protocol will be a reference point, guide and standard.
Our Pacific governments have already committed regionally to act on men’s violence against women and girls, and every Pacific country should support the creation, adoption, and implementation of a new Optional Protocol to Cedaw to end violence against women and girls.
I encourage those of us in the region who are passionate and committed to ending men’s violence against women to advocate to their governments on the need to for an Optional Protocol specific to violence against women and girls and their protection and to call on them to support a new Optional Protocol.
We can build a safer world where all women and girls live free from men’s violence.
We can help create ripples into waves toward equality and justice.
To all the PNG women reading this, or hearing about this article – thank you for the immensity of the work that you all do, which so often is unrecognised, unpaid, unappreciated, unacknowledged and undervalued.
Your lives, your experiences and your voices is the foundation of everything we are fighting for.
To all of you women who carry us on your shoulders, a belated Happy International Women’s Day to all the women in PNG and the Pacific.

For more information, please visit everywoman.org or contact Tevita Seruilumi on [email protected]

• TEVITA SERUILUMI is a lawyer and an expert on men’s violence against women, legal frameworks, investigation and prosecution of violence against women and perpetrator programming. Tevita is a member of Every Woman Organization, representing the Pacific.