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Title Women, violence & the city: addressing gender-based violence in urban settlements
Full text http://hdl.handle.net/1885/14296
Date 2011
Author(s) Oldfield, Rebekah
Abstract Violence against women is a universal epidemic. It does not discriminate between age, income, ethnicity or religion. One in three women worldwide will experience violence in their lifetime. Despite the monolithic universality of the problem at the global level, the lived experience of being violently abused in the workplace, public spaces or the home is intensely personal. This tension between the particularity of local manifestations of violence against women and the overwhelming prevalence of the issue worldwide confounds traditional aid interventions. Navigating between the local and the global provokes questions about management and governance in aid. Should development be 'top-down' or 'bottom-up'? How can local custom and tradition be reconciled with a 'universal' human rights approach to aid? How do we target an individual's specific encounter with violence, while developing models of aid and assistance that can be replicated on a wider scale? This report seeks to determine how comprehensive the nascent UN Women Safe Cities for Women and Girls Global Programme (2008-2015) will be in addressing key factors contributing to gender-based violence in urban settlements. The 'Port Moresby: A Safer City for Women' pilot initiative (as an intervention representative of the Global Programme) is examined through the conceptual lens of governance, focusing on those aspects pertinent to the Global Safe Cities Programme: human security, spatial governmentality, active citizenship and multi-stakeholder aid interventions. The Safe Cities Global Programme is a promising initiative born from successful, smaller 'Safe City' interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean. Its approach to reducing violence against women and girls in urban areas is holistic and recognizes how gender intersects with all areas of human development; ending violence against women and girls is viewed in relation to women's increased access to decision-making, economic opportunity and basic social services such as education, health and sanitation. The Global Programme will be piloted in five cities: Port Moresby (Papua New Guinea), Kigali (Rwanda), Quito (Ecuador), New Delhi (India) and Cairo (Egypt). The 'Port Moresby: A Safer City for Women' pilot initiative is a timely intervention into the situation of women in Papua New Guinea. Violence, poor governance and corruption have plagued the country since its Independence from an Australian-administered UN Trusteeship in 1975. Although rich in natural resources, Papua New Guinea has experienced little economic growth and its citizens suffer from the poverty of opportunities the country offers. Yet Papua New Guinea is at the cusp of a period of potentially radical change. The threat of the raskol gangs, which terrorized Port Moresby in the 1980s, has diminished and the current government includes leaders committed to promoting gender equality and bringing about social reform. Given the extent to which genderbased violence is often embedded in a culture or society, any intervention seeking to target the issue requires significant backing from the relevant government. 'Port Moresby: A Safer City for Women' hopes to capitalize on this period of trustworthy leadership in the government. Additionally, Port Moresby will benefit from the discovery of significant deposits of Liquid Natural Gas in the region and the construction of the Exxon Mobil pipeline to Australia, with increased infrastructure already being built, greater employment opportunities available and substantial foreign financial investment in the country. 'Port Moresby: A Safer City for Women' seeks to capitalize on this opportunity for social and economic change. The programme uses two marketplaces as entry-points for reducing violence against women in the city and promoting women's active citizenship through their empowerment in the markets. Still, there are gaps in the initiative. Understanding 'women's rights' as 'human rights' requires that 'women's insecurity' also be viewed as a broader concern of 'human insecurity'. Although the Global Programme is a holistic model, acknowledging how gender issues intersect with all areas of human development, it needs to expand its definition of violence in order to recognize the diversity of violence experienced by women. The Impact Evaluation module proposed for the 'Port Moresby: A Safer City for Women' programme does not sufficiently account for women's experiences of structural and psychological violence, which are enacted over long periods of time and resist quantitative analysis. Inadequate infrastructure such as poor lighting, roads, buildings and a lack of cheap overnight accommodation and storage near marketplaces contribute to a hostile urban environment for citizens and women in particular. While 'Port Moresby: A Safer City for Women' aims to improve market infrastructure, it fails to address the needs of rural women participating in the urban informal economy and the risks they face in order to do so. The marketplace does not exist in isolation. It is necessary to acknowledge the relationship between urban and rural environments and how the poverty of rural women forces their participation in the urban informal economy. Additionally, the Global Programme focuses on the prevention of violence rather than the provision of support for victims. Yet this focus is at odds with the initiative's framework of women's active citizenship. In line with the Global Programme's holistic approach to reducing violence against women, the establishment of safe houses for victims should be included as a key component of the model, with the aim of providing support to women disempowered by their experiences of violence. A major component of the Global Programme is its high level of engagement with civil society. The need to engage civil society organizations for effective aid and development work is widely acknowledged. Multistakeholder interventions allow for a variety of actors to collaborate on a shared issue, fostering local to global networks, knowledge-sharing and a comprehensive approach to aid and development. Given the numerous actors involved in 'Port Moresby: A Safer City for Women', it is crucial that the programme develop a long-term strategy for maintaining strong and sustainable working relationships between stakeholders throughoutanticipated transitional periods, such as local elections in 2012. The 'Port Moresby: A Safer City for Women' pilot initiative is an exciting opportunity for increased Australian participation in the struggle to end violence against women and girls in Melanesia. Already the primary donor to Papua New Guinea, Australia is committed to being involved in 'Port Moresby: A Safer City for Women', although to what extent is unclear. The Port Moresby programme is lacking reliable and long-term core funding and would benefit from direct financial investment from AusAID. However, Australian involvement in 'Port Moresby: A Safer City for Women' requires that AusAID improve on current work practice in relation to civil society. Despite a long history of using Papua New Guinean churches, in particular, and other civil society organizations as service providers, AusAID is yet to articulate a clear strategy for engaging with civil society. Participation in a multi-stakeholder intervention of this sort demands that AusAID's policy on working with civil society organizations be transparent and formally established. Given AusAID's intention to make ending violence against women and girls a strategic priority in their aid and development work and their lack of any significant action on this objective to date, it is recommended that AusAID adopt the Safe Cities Free of Violence for Women and Girls Global Programme as a framework for aid interventions targeting violence against women and girls in the Pacific region. Despite gaps in the initiative, the nascent Global Programme is a promising venture that should lead to a significant reduction in violence against women and girls in urban areas within a short timeframe.
Subject(s) violence against women; city violence; UN Women Safe Cities for Women and Girls Global Programme (2008-2015); urban settlements; hostile urban environments
Type of publication Report
Rights Copyright the author/s
Repository Canberra - Australian National University
Added to C-A: 2015-07-15;08:32:47