Violence Against Women: A Human Security Perspective

This WLP special session at the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) 2005 Annual Meeting provides a forum for scholar/activists from Muslim-majority societies to address major challenges to eliminating violence against women and girls from a human security perspective. Presenters will discuss grassroots, national, and regional measures needed to raise awareness, initiate reform legislation, and create synergy for ongoing efforts to prevent violence and to promote human rights of women.

Violence against women, a manifestation of the historically unequal power relations between men and women, remains one of the primary obstacles to empowering women and achieving peace and security for all.

Women have been systematically deprived of knowledge and skills that might help them to become better equipped to protect themselves against violence, including knowledge of the existing laws, religious texts, international injunctions on human rights, and the demands made by other women for rights in their community and elsewhere.

In the last ten years, women's rights activists in Muslim-majority countries have taken significant strides in initiating legislation that helps improve the status of women, protect women from violence, and punish perpetrators of violence. Policy-makers enlightened and influenced by women activists are bringing about changes that will lead to eradication of violence against women in all its forms.

To launch a successful effort to eliminate violence against women in Muslim societies we need to link it to the process of empowerment of women and human security. This involves helping women to identify the sources of violence at the family, community, society, and state levels, providing the skills and venues for them to articulate and communicate their understanding of and information about violence to other women and men in their countries and abroad, and to mobilize to influence the state to take measures to eliminate violence against women.

Nawal Ammar joins WLP representatives as a panelist. Nawal is Professor of Justice Studies at Kent State University, and a cultural anthropologist whose area of specialization is the Middle East and North Africa. Her areas of expertise include: restorative justice, Islamic jurisprudence, women and the law in Arab Islamic societies, and social service delivery.