Violence against women and international security
On October 6, U.S. President Donald Trump signed into law a bill for which feminists had long campaigned: the Women, Peace, and Security Act of 2017. This bill recognizes how important women are to achieving global security. It also aims to increase their participation in
U.S. conflict mediation around the world. Yet the act fails to acknowledge the most common threat to women: domestic violence, especially violence perpetrated by intimate partners. As the Act focuses explicitly on sexual crimes committed by armed organizations, it prioritizes violence perpetrated by combatants, as opposed to intimate partners. Such a focus sends the wrong message—that violence occurring in wartime is more egregious than the violence that about one-third of women experience inside their homes.
The shocking narratives of wartime rape certainly attract public attention. But social scientists have found that violence committed by intimate partners is the more common threat to women’s physical security. The World Health Organization estimates that almost one-third of women who have been in a relationship have experienced physical or sexual violence by their intimate partner. And 38 percent of female murders are committed by a boyfriend or spouse. By comparison, sexual violence done by armed groups is much less prevalent. According to a survey of 12 rural communities in Côte d’Ivoire during the 2000–2007 conflict, only four percent of women suffered forced sex by armed groups. Another survey of 15 conflict-affected municipalities in Colombia found that the reported rate of rape by family members was triple the reported rate by combatants.
New research also suggests that intimate partner violence may be a predictor of other forms of mass violence. According to one study , in more than half of U.S. mass shootings between 2009 and 2016, the male killer shot an intimate partner or another family member. Both the 2017 Texas church shooter and the man who killed 49 people at an Orlando nightclub in 2016 had histories of domestic violence. In the 2012 book Sex and World Peace , the scholar Valerie M. Hudson and her colleagues used quantitative measures and found a relationship between the physical security of women and the overall peacefulness of states. Hudson suggests that when violence against women in the home is not controlled, “dysfunctional patterns of violence” are diffused throughout society. Men rehearse scripts of violent behavior against women at home and, once these aggressions are normalized, they feel empowered to act in similar ways on more public stages.
What, then, can be done to ensure that domestic violence against women is prioritized in U.S. foreign policy? First, the Trump administration can strengthen the U.S. government institutions that are spearheading global efforts to prevent domestic violence. Second, the Trump administration should increase funding to prevent domestic violence against women globally. In addition, women’s rights activists can themselves do more to ensure that domestic violence is prioritized by implementers of the women agenda. They should refuse to accept any distinction between domestic violence and other forms of conflict related violence —a distinction that has resulted in a privileging of certain types of victims over others. Violence in the home must be treated with the seriousness that its prevalence demands.