INITIATIVE: Ending Violence against Women: A Challenge for Development

Human rights and development responses to violence against women Ending Violence against Women: A Challenge for Development, this book was written by Francine Pickup with Suzanne Williams and Caroline Sweetman and published by OXFAM GB.

With respect to violence against women, it was not until 1949, with the adoption of the Fourth Geneva Convention (relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War), that reference was made to rape and sexual assault .
This Convention offers women limited protection. The first limitation is due to the field of application of the Convention, that is, international armed conflict. Secondly, according to Article 27 of the Convention, women are to be protected ‘against any attack on their honour, in particular against rape, enforced prostitution, or any form of indecent assault.' This formulation has been criticised by feminist scholars as it fails to define sexual violence as an attack on the person. Hilary Charlesworth and Christine Chinkin have noted that this provision does not explicitly prohibit these offences, but portrays women as in need of protection from them. In addition, ‘by designating rape as a crime against “honour” rather than one of violence the provision presents women as male and family property.

The two Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions of 8 June 1977(i.e. relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts, Protocol I, and to the Protection of Victims of Non-International Armed Conflicts, Protocol II) further develop the protection measures to be accorded to civilians in times of conflict. With respect to women, Protocol I forgoes the notion of women's honor but retains the language of special respect and protection to be accorded to them (Article 76). In turn, Protocol II, in a similar vein, prohibits ‘outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment, rape, enforced prostitution and any form of indecent assault' (Article 4), thereby failing to define rape as a violent attack on the person.

The Geneva Conventions and Protocol I provide for universal jurisdiction in national courts for particularly heinous crimes – known as ‘grave breaches' of the Conventions. Universal jurisdiction imposes a duty on the High Contracting Parties to the Conventions to investigate, arrest, prosecute, and punish, those responsible for such acts irrespective of whether the acts were committed in the territory of the State, by one of its nationals, or against one of its nationals.
However, rape, enforced prostitution, and sexual assault are not explicitly designated as grave breaches, although some argue that they fit within other categories of grave breaches such as ‘willfully causing grave suffering or serious injury to body or health' and ‘torture or inhumane treatment'.

In addition, Common Article 3 to the Geneva Conventions, applicable to internal armed conflict, prohibits violence to life and the person, cruel treatment and torture, and humiliating and degrading treatment. As with the concept of grave breaches, sexual violence is not explicitly mentioned in the list of proscribed acts.

As a result of lobbying by women's groups, activists, and NGOs, governments recognized in the 1990s that the Geneva Conventions had not dealt adequately with crimes of sexual violence. In stressing women's ‘honors', the Conventions fail to treat sexual violence as a human rights abuse that violates women's bodily integrity. As noted by Radhika Coomaraswamy, stereotypical concepts of femininity have been enshrined in humanitarian law.