WUNRN
LIMIT ARMS EXPORTS TO REDUCE
VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN
The availability of small arms increases sexual violence against women. Therefore, gender based violence needs to be central to international discussions on the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), and states must act to end impunity for armed violence against women.
© Reuter Stringer
When you call for help, people hear but they don’t come out to help when there are people with guns around
Marie was gang raped on 10 June 2010. “When you call for help, people hear but they don’t come out to help when there are people with guns around,” she says.
Her story is one of many others in Amnesty International’s
January 2011 report on
Between February 28 and March 4 2011, states gathered in
What impact do international transfers of conventional arms and ammunitions have on women’s lives?
Marie’s story reveals the invisible impact of armed violence: its impact on women’s minds, bodies and freedom. High death and injury rates of men are the most obvious and visible effects of gun violence. Yet what fails to appear in statistics is when guns are not used to kill but to exert power; when guns are used behind closed doors to subjugate family members; when guns are used to threaten adolescent girls with sexual violence, forcing entire families to flee. What we fail to talk about, when we talk about small arms, are the rapes of tens of thousands of women at gunpoint.
There is a strong correlation between carrying small arms and notions of masculinity, considered to be traditional “gun-culture”. Armed conflict can change men’s views about what qualifies as masculine behaviour: group pressure can amplify men’s aggressiveness and inclination to treat women as inferior. Since almost all men are armed in times of conflict, their weaponry can be implicated in the exercise of power over women.
In
Guns aid and exacerbate violence against women and girls, both during and after conflicts
During four days in the summer of 2010, a mass rape occurred
in Luvungi,
In Colombia, which has the second highest number of internally displaced people in the world after Sudan, 2 out 10 displaced women identify sexual violence as the direct cause of their displacement. In the armed conflict, all parties use sexual violence as a weapon of war.
In
In
The UN Security Council has recognised that rape in armed conflict is a threat to international security. So why are so many guns being sold to so many countries where rape is a strategy, a tactic to dehumanise and subjugate?
"For women, war is not over when it’s over."