Speech

Remarks On Closing of the East, Central and Southern Africa Regional Gender-based Violence Strategy Consultation

Remarks by USAID/Zambia Mission Director James Bednar

Livingstone, Zambia  | Thursday, March 09, 2006

 

Ladies and Gentlemen:

It is an honor for me to be with you today. This gathering is truly historic in both its subject and in its scope. The alliance of UNICEF, UNFPA, UNIFEM and USAID to address the ever-widening expanse of gender-based violence is not only appropriate, but perhaps, long over due. For while documentation of gender-based violence is not new, the tangled web of psychological and socio-cultural factors that underlies this violence is deeply ingrained in the cultural context of Africa and indeed, much of the world.

The bodies of young children and adult women have long been the battleground in settings of poverty, conflict and social inequality. And they are hardly new terrain in the battle of the sexes. Such physical abuse takes place in the homes, the communities and the villages of too many countries around the developed and the developing world. The kind of violence you are now addressing is an extension of a centuries-old ideology that deems women and children fair game - repositories for anger, frustration and abuse.

Your own research has proved that sexual violence is inextricably tied to cultural views of women that have yet to be addressed. An estimated one in three of the world’s female population has been physically or sexually abused by one or more men at some point in their lives. A report by Johns Hopkins University on gender-based violence indicates that violence against women is the most pervasive yet least recognized human rights abuse in the world.  And gender-based violence is a subject that USAID does not intend to ignore. Not in America. Not in Africa. And not around the globe. 

USAID is proud to stand beside the agencies of the United Nations to confront this most egregious of crimes.  Here in Africa, such practices as female genital cutting, early child marriage and wife inheritance are accepted cultural practice. They are so ingrained as to be considered essential components of social maturation.  But the very seams of social fabric are beginning to strain, ladies and gentlemen.

Sexual abuse and its concomitant psychological and physical illnesses are placing an unacceptable burden on already weakened social services. HIV/AIDS, sexually transmitted diseases and traumatic gynecological fistula are tearing this region apart, and their primary victims are young girls and women, the backbone, the main productive force in the subsistence rural economy.

This cannot be allowed to go on unaddressed, ladies and gentlemen. Not if we want to continue to face ourselves as we go about trying to mitigate the less discomforting manifestations of poverty and conflict.

What are we to think when our hospital wards are filled to overflowing with women who require antibiotics, anti-retrovirals and more often now, gynecological surgery to survive physical abuse? What are we to think when so many of those in our surgical and medical wards are children as young as five or six?  Can we expect that these children will ever overcome the horror and fear of the horrific violence done to them?  And what of the women who, due to social stigma, choose never to reveal themselves as victims of such violence? 

The recognition that gender-based violence is also a human rights issue is a crucial step forward in combating the growing incidence of global human trafficking and of particular concern when we approach issues such as human migration in the form of refugees and internally displaced persons.

Ladies and gentlemen, you are the vanguard of compassion on the frontlines of this social and moral campaign against gender-based violence - and no, we should not be afraid to invoke the word morality when it applies to issues of human rights. And because you are on the frontlines, you have taken on a greater responsibility. Not only to develop programs and policies to address this deep-seated cultural and societal injustice, but to foster the reconstruction of equality and understanding without which the children and adult women of this region cannot continue to survive.

Of course, the greatest challenge you must take on is the culture of impunity that practically condones gender-based violence. And this impunity runs from the villages to the houses of parliament in so many countries in East, Central and Southern Africa.

Let me explain what I mean when I say impunity. Impunity exists when a woman must hide that she has been raped if she wishes to stay in her home and her community. Impunity keeps her silent.

Impunity exists when men, both inside and outside of marriage, are free to abuse society’s most vulnerable without fear of retribution. When they believe that rape is a right entitled to them by their status merely as men. Or when they are told the rape of a young virgin purifies them of AIDS.  And impunity exists when despite the overwhelming moral implications, women and young girls are sold as commodities on the world-wide market.

And this culture of impunity exists even at the highest levels of government.

When the laws against gender-based violence are so weak as to make prosecution of rape nearly impossible in so much of the region; when the relevant international legal instruments have been ratified and then ignored by so many governments, we must condemn and begin to rescind the impunity that exists at this most crucial of levels.

And until this crime is no longer tacitly encouraged by a lack of concern on all parts of society, hospital wards will be full. And this continent’s women and children perhaps irreparably traumatized.

I truly hope that some day we will look back on gender-based violence as some strange and misguided evil that accompanied a particularly frustrated period in global development. For only when we can speak of it in the past tense, only then will we be free to tell women they are safe in their bodies again. And only then will we be able to tell children they are safe in their childhoods again.

I am deeply gratified to be able to address you today.  I am certain that the last few days have fostered a fervent consensus among you to move forward together on this most critical of issues. And I thank you for inviting me here to be a part of it.

Thank you.