Human Rights

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10 December 2007
State Department Links Violence Against Women, Human Rights

By Jane Morse
USINFO Staff Writer

Washington -- U.S. embassies around the world organized 16 days of activities focused on the problem of violence against women to draw a symbolic link between the International Day Against Violence Against Women -- November 25 -- and International Human Rights Day -- December 10.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in her directive to all U.S. embassies, called for engagement with host country governments, civil society and media.

Preventing violence against women worldwide is part of President Bush’s Freedom Agenda. Regarded as having reached “epidemic proportions,” violence against women includes rape, sex trafficking, domestic abuse and honor-related crimes.

A DEPLORABLE PART OF MANY CULTURES

Unfortunately, violence against women is accepted in many cultures that regard such behavior as “a private family matter,” says Andrea Bottner, the senior coordinator for the U.S. Department of State’s Office of International Women’s Issues.

“Culturally, there are attitudes that women are ‘less’ than men, women ‘deserve’ to be treated this way, abused this way, because they are ‘less’ than men or because they don’t deserve the same respect or social standing that men would get in a culture. I think you will find levels of those feelings in every culture,” she said in a recent interview in Budapest, Hungary, with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Bottner was in Budapest to attend an international conference on the changing role of women.

“Everybody in the community needs to be part of the solution,” Bottner said, calling for broad education and awareness programs to change cultural attitudes about women. Especially crucial in combating violence against women, she said, is the involvement of law enforcement officials, prosecutors, judges, nongovernmental organizations, community activists and health and mental health professionals.

Bottner said the U.S. Congress is working on legislation dealing with international violence against women, which will be modeled on the Violence Against Women Act that was passed in the United States in 1994.

“Eliminating violence against women has long been a goal of the United States in our foreign policy,” Bottner said. “We continue to make the case that violence against women is a human rights abuse, a criminal issue.”

For more information, see a transcript of Bottner’s interview and the USINFO collection Women in the Global Community.

(USINFO is produced by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)

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