Pruebas de consumo energético

The 1990s international campaign to address women’s rights as human rights appears

to contradict post-modern formulations and is evidence of the distance between the

feminist academic discussions and the international activism.

In this global campaign for women’s human rights, the dichotomy private/public is

stretched to the limit comparing the violence against women with other forms of

human rights violation in which traditionally the state has been the infractor. The

main argument is that so much gender violence is perpetrated by private individuals

that it should not be ignored as an issue of human rights (Charlesworth et al. 1991). It

has also been suggested that the state is responsible for the non prosecution of the

cases of gender violence, consequently, if it fails it is in a way, an accomplice

(Romany 1994).

The central idea of the feminist perspective on women' rights as human rights is the

concept of gender violence or the so called 'violence against women'. This refers to all

acts of violence or abuse that women suffer for the fact of "being women', as a

consequence of their subordinate position in society". It includes the most diverse

types of gender-based abuse such as domestic violence, rape, women trafficking,

genital mutilation, sexual harassment and death by dowry amongst others.

From the seventies onwards, feminists have worked and campaigned on the issue of

'violence against women’ at international levels. In 1979 the United Nations adopted

the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of discrimination against women

(CEDAW) which was regarded as a great advance in the defence of women's rights,

however, this convention did not address explicitly the problem of domestic violence.

This omission 'prompted the formation of a global coalition of 900 women's

organisations, which successfully lobbied’ for recognition of gender violence as a

human rights violation at United Nations level. In 1992, CEDAW was amended with

a recommendation 'to protect women against all kinds of violence' and from 1994 a

UN 'Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences' is

responsible for reporting the problem at world-wide levels. Women met at the fourth

United Nations World Conference on Women in Beijing promoting a 'Beijing Platform

for Action’ which urged governments to 'take integrated measures to prevent and

eliminate violence against women' (British Council 1999:3-4). In these international

actions the lobby of Latin American feminists has played a leading role (Cullington

1994:197).

In a feminist understanding, domestic violence has been considered as the main

expression of gender violence and specific strategies have been designed to tackle it in K See, for example, the book edited by Peters and Wolper (1995), particularly Bunch (1995).

its dimension whilst acknowledging the need for specialised bodies of officers,

activists and academics. To subsume domestic violence in a global campaign for

human rights has complicated an already complex problem and this is being done at

both levels, at the practical level (implementation) and at discursive level.

At the practical level we can observe two trends. There is a channel of resources

toward the global issue of women's rights as human rights. At present, there is a

self-critique of the previous overemphasis on domestic violence in detriment of the

general issue of gender violence. A report of the British Council (1999:6) reads as

follows: 'It is ironic that our attempts to highlight violence within families may

overshadow the violence committed by those outside them'. This self-critique could

be valid in countries which have dedicated resources to face the issue of domestic

violence but certainly does not apply in countries where the problem has hardly been

in the public attention. Additionally, in richer countries there is a set of services

provided by the state, in most European countries there is an experience of a ‘welfare

state’, however, in poorer countries like those in Latin America, there has never been a

state as provider of basic services for the population In our countries, NGOs

dedicated to improving women’s position in society were able to channel international

aid to tackle the problem, becoming almost the only social support in cases of

domestic violence. At present, the NGOs, under pressure from international funding

bodies are concentrating on working 'with the state' because these bodies hold the

presumption that there is an infrastructure that can be successfully employed to

address the issue of gender violence in its whole complexity. The second trend, is a

paradoxical one, it has been reported that many governments have confused the terms

policies on this area. For instance, it is in this context in which laws on domestic (or

family) violence have been enacted in various countries (British Council 1999).

At the discursive level, the most important character of the campaign is the

homogenisation of 'all' women suffering violence and responses to this wide range of

situations of gender violence. A report by Oxfam (1999:2) about the result of a 1998

international workshop on violence against women states that responses to violence

against women can be developed ‘...within a framework of sanctions (exacting cost

from the perpetrators) and sanctuary (supporting and empowering women)’ In a

British Council (1999:20) report on domestic violence can be read the following: The

basic philosophy of any strategy on gender violence must be to support and empower

women and girls and to challenge abusive men'. In this report the concepts of

‘sanctuary’ and ‘sanctions’ are also employed. It also proposes to challenge gender

violence: 'ending the silence', in the rationality of taking the private into the public.

However, there are expressions of gender violence that can be placed in what the West

would call the 'public sphere', such as genital mutilation which is performed as a

central community-ritual event, another case is that of mass rapes in war There is

also the problem of non differentiation between perpetrators. In many cases of gender

violence women are the aggressors, as in the case of genital mutilation or in the cases

of death by dowry. It has been explained that these women as perpetrators are

subsumed in a structure of male power which conditioned them to behave in such a

way. While this may be true, still it is quite difficult to see how such a violence can be

challenged at practical level without addressing women as perpetrators. Additionally,

for the victims, there is a difference between a partner who beats them and a

between 'the victims'. It is not the same to be a beaten women in a middle class urban

neighbourhood, as to be a beaten poor black woman or a woman in the highlands of

Peru, in terms o f resources and in terms of perceptions by the legal representatives9.

Another aspect of the discursive level of this global campaign is the emphasis on the

extreme cases o f violence in intimate relationships in order to ‘make the case’ of

domestic violence as human rights violation, which contradicts the original feminist

discourse that domestic violence is a pervasive and ‘normalised’ event in the life of

women and men. The literature addressing women's human rights contains plenty of

quotations such as this one in Beasly and Thomas (1994:323):

‘Maria was brutally assaulted in her own kitchen in England by a man wielding two knives. He held one of the weapons at her throat, while raping her with the other. After he finished, the man doused her with alcohol and set her alight with a blow torch. Maria lived through the assault to prosecute the man....’

While cases like Maria exist and are a painful truth, the experience of working in

domestic violence reveals to us that most of the coercion that women suffer in their

daily life by their partners is not necessarily expressed in an ostensible physical injury

and often is more an imminent than an actual violence but enough to make women live

in fear. For instance, in the women’s police station of Lima, 10,000 women arrive

every year complaining about domestic violence, but only approximately 4,500 of

them have evidence of physical injury, the rest do not fulfil that requirement. All

10,000 women suffer domestic violence but in the form of threats, insults or ‘minor’

9

The following comments o f Esteva and Prakash (1998 117), serious critics o f the Western 'global project' o f human rights, is certainly illustrative o f what I am trying to express here 'Grander and more global than all the other conferences now regularly held from Malaysia to Mexico to promote human rights, its participants sought to liberate and bring justice to all the oppressed peoples o f earth, and especially those whom they deem the worst o ff the impoverished woman and girl in the Third World, bought and sold, beaten and raped, a veritable slave o f husband, in-laws, or employer, to the 100 million missing women o f Asia -the girls who do not survive their conception Forty thousand determined delegates flew back to their nations-states from Beijing with a 12-Point Platform for global action O f Herculean dimension, this Platform proposed bringing the unschooled, unclothed, homeless, unfed, abused, tortured and unfairly imprisoned under one humane universal umbrella o f human rights'

physical assaults like pushing, slapping in the face or pulling the hair (Estremadoyro

1993). On the other hand, in the global campaign the perpetrators are seen as violent,

alienated men, and not as ‘ordinary’ husbands that is precisely what the battered

women movement was trying to address. The discourse of human rights has impacted

in such a way on the issue of domestic violence that Marcus (1994) proposed that

domestic violence should be re-baptised as ‘terrorism in the home’.

Another aspect of this perspective on women's human rights is reinforcing the

tendency to take the law and the legal system unproblematicaly. In the literature on

the subject10 the legal system is presented as failing to provide an appropriate

legislation and a gender awareness in their legal representatives. In this sense, there is

implicit the idea that, as Smart would say, implementing ‘corrective’ measures, the

law is able to provide adequate solution to gender violence cases. The law is rarely

considered, as ‘part of the problem’ (Freeman 1982:132). Additionally, the law is

almost exclusively thought of as the 'state law '. Other ways of solving conflict, or as

Santos (1995) would say other 'legal landscapes' are simply not taken into account.