Beijing Platform for Action. Chapter IV: Strategic Objectives and Actions: Paragraph 139
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/07/16
Strategic objective D.3.
Eliminate trafficking in women and assist victims of violence due to prostitution and trafficking
Actions to be taken
139. During times of armed conflict and the collapse of communities, the role of women is crucial. They often work to preserve social order in the midst of armed and other conflicts. Women make an important but often unrecognized contribution as peace educators both in their families and in their societies.
Beijing Declaration (1995)
When we look at the levels of the devastation wrought and brought by war, the tragedy comes a shock to some, as a casual fact of the world to others, and even, in fact, comes down to the level of the individual and the family. For example, when we think of a home, as Dr. Norman Finkelstein notes about the Palestinians, the destruction, the indiscriminate and deliberate bulldozing, of a home is the loss of space, personal emotive space – a vacancy for oneself that, by that nature of personal attachment, is not, in fact, vacant.
War produces a collapse of individuals and families. It can collapse communities too. The role of women in these contexts is as important as in the preventative processes of including women in the work of increasing peace and reducing war, e.g., arguing for reduced military expenditures of societies. Women, by the reckoning of the writers of the Beijing Declaration “often work to preserve social order,” even in “the midst of armed and other conflicts.”
This is a highly salient fact of the matter. Women tend to make more peace; men tend to make more war. However, as the narratives around war blur the historical facts, women can have an “often” – there’s that word again – “unrecognized contribution as peace educators” for the families and the communities. Without the women as mediators or intermediaries, we can come to experience more war, not less, and so more death and destruction – and “collapse of communities” – not less.
Indeed, those conditions, as have been noted, wherein women can be subject to prostitution and trafficking can be rife in these areas. We’re left with the issues of men and women dying, and with poorer livelihoods, without the contributions of women as preventatives of the “collapse of communities” reflective of individual, familial, and, by implication, partial societal collapse.
–(Updated 2018-11-10, only use the updated listing, please) 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 and the optional protocol (1993).
- Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (1995), Five-year review of progress (2000), 10-year review in 2005, the 15-year review in 2010, and the 20-year review in 2015.
- United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000), and the UN Security Council additional resolutions on women, peace and security: 1820 (2008), 1888 (2009), 1889 (2009), 1960 (2010), 2106 (2013), 2122 (2013), and 2242 (2015).
- 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.
- UN Women’s strategic plan, 2018–2021
- 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
- 2015 agenda with 17 new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (169 targets for the end to poverty, combatting inequalities, and so on, by 2030). The SDGs were preceded by the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) from 2000 to 2015.
–Human Rights
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