Paragraph 11 – Beijing Platform for Action, Chapter II: Global Framework
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/09/04
11. The end of the cold war has resulted in international changes and diminished competition between the super-Powers. The threat of a global armed conflict has diminished, while international relations have improved and prospects for peace among nations have increased. Although the threat of global conflict has been reduced, wars of aggression, armed conflicts, colonial or other forms of alien domination and foreign occupation, civil wars, and terrorism continue to plague many parts of the world. Grave violations of the human rights of women occur, particularly in times of armed conflict, and include murder, torture, systematic rape, forced pregnancy and forced abortion, in particular under policies of ethnic cleansing.
Beijing Declaration (1995)
With the end of the Cold War came another phase in the eras of the geopolitical situation for much but not all of the world, these changes had impacts, especially, on the super-powers of the time, the nations connected with them, and the individual citizens too. Interestingly, we can note the impacts on the lives of men and women of the time too.
These changes in societies can, sometimes, result in the clamping down on the individual citizens, especially so regarding the reproductive rights of women. None of this is a far cry from the distant past. In fact, right before our parents’ eyes, we can see the work in Romania with Decree 770. Reproduction matters to authoritarian regimes. The collapse of some former superpowers remains important in the history of women’s rights too.
There came with the diminution of the superpowers a decrease in the level of the desired competition between them. A decrease in the threat of armed conflict all over the world ensued as well. This increased the potential or prospects for peace through an improvement in international relations. Now, we can, along with the concomitant decline in colonialism and its impacts, look at the rights of women and the degradation and maltreatment of women at the same time.
Rape has been a weapon of war. Domestic and violence physical violence have been used to control women or oppress them. The question about toxic masculinity amounts to the elimination of that form of masculinity. The idea of masculinity, in part, imagined by many of the conservatives. They talk past one another. The toxic masculinity spoke of by progressive and liberal commentators comes in the form leading to “murder, torture, systematic rape, forced pregnancy and forced abortion” and even, unfortunately sometimes, ethnic cleansing.
These violations of the basic humanity and recognition of the need for the inherent dignity of others comes from the religious and the national, the governmental. These tendencies in some of the extremes of human behavior exhibit a cognitively complex animal capable of a variety of profoundly cruel and unjust, and just unfair, behaviors and treatment of not only human beings but the natural world upon which we need to survive and are inextricably a part.
These make international forms of conflict one and the same with the work of women’s rights and their actualization, as the violent conflicts of nations and individuals tend to have repercussions with women seen as tools of war. The men in charge of the wars need more children to become soldiers and the men who abuse women feel the need to resort to violence for a variety of reasons, with one of the large ones almost certainly coming in the form of control.
The implementation of women’s rights would provide a basis to consider the greater equality of women. It would connect to the issues of war and conflict. The attribution of the same decision-making abilities to women as we already assume of men, so women can partake of civic and political life, and the military, in order to potentially influence the ways in which these wars take place if at all.
I do not attribute an angelic nature to women and a demonic one to men, but I do attribute a moderating effect to a democratic system with the incorporation of more voices into the finalization of the collective choices, typically, issued in responsibility to only a few powerful men regardless of the level of skill, quality of situational and ethical judgment, or academic qualifications or even autodidactic educational status.
With this, we could mitigate, potentially, some of the harms of massive wars, and, in fact, incorporate the concerns of women as a result of war including rape as a weapon of war and the issues surrounding women’s reproductive rights.
–One can find similar statements in other documents, conventions, declarations and so on, with the subsequent statements of equality or women’s rights:
- The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the Preamble, Article 16, and Article 25(2).
- Convention Against Discrimination in Education (1960) in Article 1.
- The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966) in Article 3, Article 7, and Article 13.
- International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966).
- Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (1979).
- Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1984).
- The Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (1993).
- Beijing Declaration(1995).
- United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000).
- Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children (2000).
- The Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa or the “Maputo Protocol” (2003).
- Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence or the Istanbul Convention (2011) Article 38 and Article 39.
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