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Impunity for Violence Against Women
Is a Global Concern
14 August 2012 - Governments are urged
to act with due diligence to prevent and investigate violence against women and
girls, prosecute perpetrators and provide protection and redress to victims.
This was contained in the report to the Human Rights Council
by Rashida Manjoo, the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its
causes and consequences.
She noted that religious, cultural, and social norms and
beliefs are largely the causal factors for harmful practices resulting in
violence against women. Therefore countries’ efforts to comply must also
address these structural causes.
Globally the prevalence of different manifestations of
killings targeting women is increasing and a lack of accountability for such
crimes remains a concern.
“Whether labelled murder, homicide, femicide, feminicide, or
‘honour’ killings, these manifestations of violence are culturally and socially
embedded, and continue to be accepted, tolerated or justified - with impunity
as the norm,” stressed the independent expert reacting to the latest killing of
women in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Impunity for the killings of women has become a global
concern, a fact noted by the UN Secretary General BAN Ki-moon when he stated
that, “Impunity for violence against women compounds the effects of such
violence as a mechanism of control. When the State fails to hold perpetrators
accountable, impunity not only intensifies the subordination and powerlessness
of the targets of violence, but also sends a message to society that male
violence against women is both acceptable and inevitable”.
These killings targeting women, Rashida Manjoo decried, are
extreme signs of existing forms of violence against women and are not isolated
incidents that arise suddenly.
They are rather the ultimate act of violence which is
experienced in a continuum of violence.
“Failure of States to guarantee the right of women to a life
free from violence” has led to many deaths of women, she adds.
In her report, she further states that the killings can both
be active, direct or passive and indirect. The direct category includes
killings as a result of intimate-partner violence; killings related to
allegations of sorcery and witchcraft; armed conflict; dowry; gender identity
and sexual orientation as a result of hatred and prejudice; ethnic- and
indigenous identity; and female infanticide and honour killings.
The indirect killings she states include deaths linked to
human trafficking, drug dealing, organized crime and gang-related activities;
maternal mortality; deaths of girls or women due to simple neglect through
starvation, ill-treatment and deliberate acts of inaction by the State.
Killings by intimate partners have significantly been
underreported and the Special Rapporteur states in her report that studies have
shown that in many countries the home is the place where a woman is most likely
to be murdered.
On killings related to allegations of sorcery and
witchcraft, the report shows that the pattern includes violent murders,
physical mutilation, women being burned or buried alive, displacement,
kidnapping and disappearance of girls and women who are also subjected to
“exorcism”.
The report further adds that crimes committed in the name of
“honour” have been characterized as being among the most severe of the harmful
practices. The murders are carried out to “cleanse" family honour and are
committed with high levels of impunity in many parts of the world.
Honour crimes also include stoning, women and girls being
coerced to commit suicide after public denunciation of their behaviour, or
being subjected to acid attacks. These crimes often go unreported, are rarely
investigated and, when punished, sentences are far less than those for equally
violent crimes.
In her 2012 report, the Special Rapporteur on violence
against women, its causes and consequences, Rashida Manjoo from