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Article Excerpt
Abstract: Despite recent moves by Congress to ratify international treaties that protect women's human rights globally, little consideration has been given to the impact of such treaties in the U.S. Not only government agencies, but women's advocacy groups, human rights organizations and even academic feminists tend to define women's human rights abuses as occurring abroad, and not in the U.S. This essay addresses reasons why domestic advocacy groups have failed to recognize the significance of addressing women's concerns in the U.S. from the perspective of women's human rights, and, more importantly, why it is vital that they do so.
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In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the attention of the country and the world turned to efforts by the U.S. to pursue and destroy al-Queda and topple its supporter, the Taliban regime controlling most of Afghanistan. As part of its campaign to generate domestic and international support for its military actions in Afghanistan, the administration used references to the harsh treatment of women by the Taliban. Extensive media coverage and remarks by the President and First Lady outlined how the Taliban had effectively undermined women's human rights by banning them from political organizations and the public sphere and subjecting them to torture and violence for such simple violations as not being fully veiled or for going to work or to school. (1) The administration's statements about the Taliban's brutality towards women brought attention to the worldwide movement to link women's rights with human rights, a movement that largely began as a way to provide a framework for responding to the global phenomenon of violence against women.
The movement to bring international attention to the unique rights violations endured by women gained momentum during the last decade, and "women's rights are human rights" became one of the key encompassing themes of the Platform for Action that emerged from the Beijing Women's conference in 1995 (see "Bejing Platform for Action," 1996). But, over the past two decades, the United States has made little effort to join the United Nations in supporting international treaties and agreements that were established specifically to extend the protections of existing human rights documents to women. Ironically, as of 2002, the United States, along with Afghanistan and Sao Tome and Principe, is one of three countries to have signed, but not yet ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), (2) a Treaty that was recently signed by Saudi Arabia (Human Rights Watch, 2001). According to Zoelle (2000), CEDAW is "the first international treaty to provide comprehensive protection of women's human rights" (p. 2). CEDAW defines discrimination against women as
... any distinction, exclusion or restriction made on the basis of sex which has the effect or purpose of impairing or nullifying the recognition, enjoyment or exercise by women, irrespective of their marital status, on a basis of equality of men and women, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural, civil or any other field (Convention on the elimination, 1979)
The treaty recognizes that existing human rights documents fail to account for the unique abuses faced by women and reflects the growing international movement to place the protection of women's human rights at the forefront of both human rights discourse and feminist discourse in the international public sphere. The heightened awareness of the ways that the women of Afghanistan suffered under the Taliban have reinvigorated efforts for the United States to ratify the treaty, which had been signed by Jimmy Carter in 1980, but had languished in the Senate whose approval is needed for ratification. In the Fall of 2001, President Bush indicated that he saw no reason to block renewed efforts to ratify the treaty, and on July 30, 2002, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted to send the Treaty to the Senate Floor for Ratification (Davis, 2002). It is a step forward, but approval is not guaranteed.
The move to finally ratify CEDAW is a profound step forward for the United States. However, it is troubling that the proponents of the Treaty frame its ratification as a largely symbolic move that would help women in countries abroad and have little or no effect at home. Further, it may be a move specifically aimed at building additional support for continuing the War on Terrorism abroad. As Senators Joseph Biden and Barbara Boxer write in their editorial to the San Francisco Chronicle, "our Constitution and gender discrimination laws already comply with the treaty requirements" (Biden & Boxer, 2002, p.1). This reflects a continuing trend by the U.S. government to view human rights abuses as existing "out there" in the developing world and not at home. (3)
In contrast to Biden and Boxer's claim, there is evidence to suggest otherwise. CEDAW and other efforts to extend human rights to include women can and should have an impact on government and social agencies within the United States. For example, according to a recent study by the National Women's Law Center, high school girls continue to be prevented from taking vocational classes 30 years after Title IX barred discrimination in education (Davis, 2002). And the adoption of CEDAW by San Francisco, one of the few cities in the United States to do so, has resulted in changes in some of the ways social services are delivered to make them more equitable (Vesely, 2002). These examples indicate, as Charlotte Bunch (1990, 1995, 2000) argues, that the linking of women's rights with human rights is potentially transformative of both human rights discourse and women's rights discourse, and offers the ability to secure equal rights and improve the status of women and girls everywhere.
But, what we consider even more troubling than the federal government's use of human rights discourse only within the context of international policy and international relations, blatantly refusing to acknowledge its domestic implications, is that human rights groups as well as feminist groups in the U.S. seem to have avoided addressing the issue of women's rights as human rights within the U.S. Many (though not all) of these women's and human rights advocacy groups save human rights terminology again for the abuses women living in other countries face. In other words, domestic advocacy groups have failed to bring the global home. Without an acknowledgement of the ways that the United States can benefit from a self-analysis in light of CEDAW, the movement to ratify the Convention is in danger of stagnating, or if its proponents do succeed in gaining Senate approval and the President signs the Treaty, its symbolic power may be negligible. Without recognizing the implicit connections between human rights violations against women abroad and those (perhaps) subtler, though equally debilitating, violations at home, feminists, human rights activists and politicians risk framing the issue from a position of arrogance and misinformation. Lacking a perspective of women's human rights violations in the U.S. risks seeing women abroad as "patriarchal prisoners" or "patriarchal dupes" rather than as women with agency (like women in the U.S.) struggling to define themselves and gain empowerment in their own cultures (Narayan, 1999).
In the first section of the paper, we explain why the linking of human rights discourse and women's rights discourse is so vital to the development of both domestic and international feminism. In the second section, we offer an analysis of some recent government actions and the websites of several major women's rights and human rights organizations as illustrations of how the linking of women's rights with human rights has not yet established a foothold in the discourse of women's advocacy in the U.S. This is not a systematic analysis but an overview of some key indicators that the global has not yet been brought home. In the third section, we suggest some reasons for this apparent reticence to fully develop a framework for understanding women's rights as human rights both in U.S. policy making and by feminist advocacy groups and what models we might use to shift discourse and thinking in that direction.
Linking Human Rights and Women's Rights as a Transformative Strategy
The move to discuss women's rights in terms of human rights was an intentional one, made in the hopes of mainstreaming feminism and of avoiding the "growing backlash against feminism from conservative forces" (McFarland, 1998, p. 52). Although some have noted a range of weaknesses with this framework (e.g. McFarland, 1998), we take the position of Bunch and others that women's rights as human rights discourse does indeed offer a transformative potential, and provides a framework for thinking and acting from a more global perspective about...
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