The Social Medicine Portal

Some reflections on the human rights of women.

Allow me to present these reflections in the form of bullets:

• A truly women-centered approach to human rights (HR) has to depart from the principle that there are an array of ‘securities’ that are indispensable for the well-being of women.
• Providing such securities has remained unresolved.
• Poor women are simply still left-out from the access to the services that can fulfill their rights.
• No matter where, women need assured security in, at least, the areas of:
  • income,
  • access to food fuel and water,
  • education/literacy/vocational training,
  • the support they get to take care of their children and their own gender-related needs,
  • their health, housing, and sanitation needs, plus
  • HR-based legal protection, environmental and personal safety including freedom from domestic violence.
• A women-centered approach to women’s rights calls upon us to focus our work more on the underlying and structural/basic causes of neglect, abuse, ill-health, malnutrition and unnecessary preventable mortality of women and their children.
• It explicitly emphasizes the need for a new set of priorities not given enough attention in current development programs. 
• To pursue this approach, we need to start with a) an explicit activity that identifies households (HHs) with women living insecure lives with many of their rights in any of the above areas being violated; to b) then, turn to demanding a more comprehensive set of interventions that simultaneously and progressively (without discrimination!) addresses the violations identified.
• The identification of HHs with vulnerable women should be accompanied by c) the identification of proven coping mechanisms utilized by other HHs and women in getting access to the different resources and services that fulfill their rights under similar difficult local conditions.
• The challenge, then, is to d) foster the needed consciousness raising for women for them to effectively place claims in front of pertinent duty bearers, as well as to e) find interventions that support the adoption of the successful coping mechanisms by a larger proportion of at-risk women in that particular environment. This becomes the basis for selecting interventions and, most importantly, for organizing women locally.
• All this requires a bigger emphasis on social mobilization programs and on coordinating locally active agencies particularly local NGOs and grassroots civil society organizations.
• If such women’s groups do not yet exist, preliminary efforts will have to be made to organize them.
• What this will also mean is that health, nutrition, water, basic education, etc. approaches impinging on women will need de-facto integration in concrete gender-specific action plans.
• Findings of the HH survey are to be discussed in community participatory fora, and if such fora do not yet exist locally, efforts will have to be made to organize them.
• When the several rights violations are identified, plans to tackle them are discussed –at the same time.*

*: This, because we consistently fail to ask ourselves “how effective is it to continue trying to tackle one HR violation at a time..?”  For instance, we now know that health or nutrition interventions alone cannot resolve the lack of access of women to get tangible results in relation to other rights that are as crucial for their wellbeing!

• Interventions selected for action will not necessarily be new, but will be combined and focused in a way that different relevant causal levels are tackled. (The more basic/structural causes are addressed, the more one will be, in one stroke, addressing several HR violations…).
• Some interventions will only need inputs (resources) and organization (mobilization) of community members and existing women’s organizations themselves; others will require organizing public pressure to get resources from outside to achieve needed results; it is this that leads to real, lasting empowerment.
• In conclusion, if towards 2015, we are to more significantly improve survival, health and nutrition outcomes of women and their children worldwide, we have to address a number of their more crucial unfulfilled rights at the same time.

Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City

cschuftan@phmovement.org