Academics, journalists, jurists and political and NGO leaders gathered on June 1st at the European Parliament offices in Madrid to debate the international patterns and causes of violence against women and the responses to a problem which, according to WHO data, affects one in three women worldwide.
Alison Brysk, Professor of Global Governance at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Scientific Coordinator of issue 117 of Revista CIDOB d’Afers Internacionals, used her presentation to set out the causes and patterns of gender-based violence and the responses to it at international level in her presentation The Struggle for Freedom from Fear: Contesting Violence against Women at the Frontiers of Globalization.
Blanca Garcés, Senior Research Fellow at CIDOB, focused part of her contribution on answering the question: Are women more vulnerable in contexts of conflict, refugees and population flows?
Gender-based violence, forced marriage, genital mutilation, feminicide, sterilisation, selective abortion, honour crimes and human trafficking for the purposes of sexual exploitation are some of the reasons people may be considered refugees for gender reasons. “But beyond people who are refugees for being women or refugees for gender reasons, we have refugee women who are subject to specific forms of violence”, Garcés explained. “They are not refugees because they are women, but they are female refugees suffering from a double vulnerability”.
You can find more information about the presentation here. The issue 117 of Revista CIDOB d’Afers Internacionals is available here.
