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Article 4
States should condemn violence against women and should not invoke any custom, tradition or religious consideration to avoid their obligations with respect to its elimination. States should pursue by all appropriate means and without delay a policy of eliminating violence against women and, to this end, should:
( i ) Take measures to ensure that law enforcement officers and public officials responsible for implementing policies to prevent, investigate and punish violence against women receive training to sensitize them to the needs of women;
( j ) Adopt all appropriate measures, especially in the field of education, to modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women and to eliminate prejudices, customary practices and all other practices based on the idea of the inferiority or superiority of either of the sexes and on stereotyped roles for men and women;
The Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (1993).
The Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (1993) or the Declaration speaks, in Article 4(i)-(j), about the rights of women in the domains of law enforcement through the investigation of Violence Against Women or VAW and in the area of the social and cultural practices with an emphasis on the fields of education.
Let’s run through some of the consideration of these subsections of the Declaration. The level of the rights to be implemented here comes in the form of the law enforcement officers and then the public officials who will be in charge of the initiatives around VAW prevention.
Those officials, whether in public office or officially involved with the law, have a duty and moral obligation within the confines and stipulations of the Declaration to enact proper prevention, investigation, and punishment of the perpetrators of VAW.
It can come in the form of an individual; it can come in the form of a larger organization. However women are determined to have undergone some form of psychological, physical, or sexual violence, they should have the correct and ethical provisions within the state representatives of the law and public office for their ability to have their needs met regarding these measures.
The measure of prevention, investigation, and punishment do not come with specifications except insofar as these domains get listing. Nonetheless, the sensitization towards the needs of women and, more importantly, to orient the prevention, investigation, and punishment techniques towards the needs of women become acutely salient in an era where powerful men have been reduced to ash heaps and rubble in the wake of reports and allegations – most often true – of foul behaviour ruining the psychological and emotional lives of women victims.
To give the basics for the ability to rehabilitate and enter back into the mainstream in some way, it would mean the minimum of compassion in order to permit women the same privileges as men in this regard; of course, veterans can undergo similar lack, in terms of provisions of re-entry into some of the society through rehabilitation, for example.
Article 4(j) speaks to the need for all appropriate implementations to be taken to change the ways in which citizens of a nation deal with one another, interact with each other, and consider the equality of the sexes – view men and women in the society in other words.
The work to eliminate the prejudices against women in the society comes in a variety of unstated forms. But the extension of the customs and culture to justify the suppression and subordination of women should not be a means by which to continue to reduce women to implicit or explicit secondary status compared to their male counterparts.
TYhe central focus of women’s equality with men or gender equality should be kept in mind as the work to reduce women to a lower-than or lesser status comes from a series of domains of operation in a society. One of the core parts of the need to reduce the reduction of women in the society is in the views.
The stereotyped views and eventual behaviors and constricting, restricting, roles expected of the females in the country. The ability to prevent this or work to reduce and then eliminate these perceptions could help with the moves towards greater gender equality and the global economic, social, and legal equality of women with the men in the society.
Even if a difficult task and not even in our lifetimes, why not try for it? If not for us, or legacy, or the country, or the gods, or God, or the future generations of humankind, why not simply as a general target with global utility for improving the health and well-being of people here-and-now and even more as things progress along a non-linear line of better lives and livelihoods?
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- The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the Preamble, Article 16, and Article 25(2).
- Convention Against Discrimination in Education (1960) in Article 1.
- The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966) in Article 3, Article 7, and Article 13.
- International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966).
- Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (1979).
- Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1984).
- The Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (1993).
- Beijing Declaration(1995).
- United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000).
- Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children (2000).
- The Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa or the “Maputo Protocol” (2003).
- Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence or the Istanbul Convention (2011) Article 38 and Article 39.
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Photo by Simon Matzinger on Unsplash