WOMEN AND SOCIAL CHANGE
Even today, many women’s basic rights are still often being violated all over the world. This happens when they live in worse conditions of poverty than men, when they face discrimination regarding access to employment or education, or when they are subjected to traditional degrading practices, to name but a few examples.
There are currently four existing conventions to safeguard women's rights: CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women); the Beijing Platform for Action (adopted by governments in the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995); Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security of the UN Security Council and its Millennium Development Goals. According to the problems identified in these agreements, the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) has indicated four strategic areas of work in order to achieve equality between men and women.
Firstly, it is necessary to achieve gender equality in democratic governments. It is a question of ensuring women’s participation so that the laws, policies and governmental institutions truly reflect the population’s needs. Moreover, UNIFEM has established equality as a basic concept in its reconstruction programmes, backing female leadership from the start.
The United Nations also stresses the disproportionate poverty burden suffered by women the world over. And if all that wasn’t enough, it also denounces that in many cases, globalisation has increased the gap, causing women to lose their jobs, their social benefits and work rights in a much higher proportion. The presence of women in decision-making circles is far too rare, and they have very few opportunities to rectify existing inequalities.
However, the most generalised abuse is gender violence. One out of three women will suffer gender violence at some point in their life, according to UN statistics. With its report “Not a Minute More: Ending Violence against Women”, UNIFEM endeavours to publicise the urgent need to fight against a problem that still goes unrecognised in many nations. Despite the fact that abuse is publicly and legally condemned in the most advanced societies, there are still many countries whose tradition favours it and in which women take the blows without a word.
The alarming expansion of HIV/AIDS is related to gender violence, which often occurs by way of sexual aggression. In Africa, where the epidemic is most serious, young women have three times the probability of becoming infected than men. Women worldwide know less about preventing infection than men, and what they do know does not protect them from abuse. UNIFEM starts from the premise that HIV/AIDS is a question of health and development, but that it is also closely linked to gender inequality.
This systematic violation of basic rights makes it difficult for many women to believe that things don’t have to be this way, and holds back their initiative to play an important part in social change.