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Lora Forsythe
(Natural Resources Institute)
Diana Lopez Castaneda
Stacy Banwell
(University of Greenwich)
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Format:
Panel
Stream:
Gender
Location:
Palmer G.05
Sessions:
Wednesday 28 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Gender-based violence and the Anthropocene: territories of risk and mobilisation.
Panel P33 at conference DSA2023: Crisis in the Anthropocene: rethinking connection and agency for development.
Gender-based violence (GBV) is a significant global health and human rights issue, affecting one in three women globally. This panel will explore the relationships between GBV, territories and environmental change and present counter responses to violence from indigenous and social movements.
Long Abstract:
Deeply entrenched historical social, political, economic and institutional inequalities, fed by histories of colonialism, have led to the use of varied and interconnected forms of violence among human-environmental relationships within any given 'territory'. These structural violences based on power inequalities exist on a 'continuum' that both exacerbates and is exacerbated by interpersonal/intergenerational violence including lack of bodily autonomy and political threats to environmental leaders and local defenders, especially women.
By applying a feminist lens to the Anthropocene, this panel will examine the prevalence and nature of gender based violence connected to environmental change, both materially and symbolically. We aim draw on territorial based cases from across the Global 'North/South' to show the risks of and responses to gender based violence, particularly in the context of food systems, climate change and resource extraction and grabbing. This will address how women's agency is affected by such inequalities and violence, while their mobilisation in responding to gender based violence addresses important issues that often neglected.
We welcome papers from inter/ transdisciplinary perspectives, particularly oral history, moral philosophy, psychology, feminist political economy and post-coloniality, in encounters with the historic and current lived experiences of women and men. We particularly would like to explore examples of indigenous and social movements as counter-responses, including those from young women from rural backgrounds, indigenous futurism, and eco-feminist movements.
Climate change has extensive effects on many facets of our existence, including our food systems and interpersonal interactions. The food system is one area where climate change and gender-based violence (GBV) interact however, there is paucity of studies on the links between climate change, food systems and GBV. In this article, we examine the relationship between climate change, food systems and gender-based violence, highlighting how these interrelated concerns can affect individuals and communities, particularly women and girls. We adopted a systematic review method, searched five databases including Web of science, Scopus, Science direct, Pubmed, EbscoHost using key pre-defined search terms up till December 2022. We identified 2,615 articles of quantitative and qualitative studies alongside grey literatures from key organisations. 26 eligible articles that investigated the relationship between climate change, several nodes of the food systems with links to GBV, were included in this review. We found that most articles domiciled within the grey literature, a handful of research and review articles were published before the COVID-19 pandemic. Our review demonstrates the knowledge frontier on the interconnectedness between climate change-food systems and GBV, bolstered by systematic social and patriarchal structures that enable and normalise GBV, and the direct and indirect pathways in which the trio combine and influence the wider community. Furthermore, we discuss how this complex interaction may reinforce a vicious cycle of food insecurity and further trigger extreme climate change in the long run. The review's findings could help to design sustainable, GBV-sensitive policy framework for food system transformation.
Identify the conceptual issues on gender-based violence and internally displaced persons in Northeastern Nigeria;
Discover the various causes of Gender Based Violence among IDPs;
Identify challenges facing IDPs in Northeastern Nigeria,
Discover the recommendations for ending gender-based violence.
Paper long abstract:
Nigeria's various issues have been a contentious menace with the increase in the number of internally displaced people scattered all over the country due to the Boko haram insurgency. The wave of abnormalities to the socioeconomic lives of the women, including children and older people in this region, places them at a high risk of abuse from insurgents, security agents deployed to protect the people in the camps and host communities. This study aims to assess the pandemic of gender-based violence and pattern related to sexual and criminal activities in northeast Nigeria. It uses qualitative research methods and secondary data that are derived from journals, articles, newspapers, and other important commentaries on contemporary issues of GBV and its impacts on the IDPs. Also, various data were analyzed via content analysis to get the best from the literature reviewed. As the conflict continues yearly, women and girls in northeastern Nigeria have become increasingly vulnerable to kidnapping, rape, exploitation, sexual slavery, and forced and early marriage. Various impacts on this creates trauma for women, children, and older people in this part of the region in Nigeria. Meanwhile, many women in the region have experienced one or more forms of gender-based violence. Violence and other criminal act in the camps for displaced persons has become an epidemic. This paper concluded that the government of Nigeria and all stakeholders, including United Nations, and Nongovernmental organizations, ensure the protection and security of all vulnerable people, including women, girls, and also boys in this fragile region.
Mocoa(Putumayo,Colombia) suffered an avalanche in 2017 that devastated the city causing deaths and disappearances. The years after the peace agreement with FARC-EP(2016-2022) have felt like that traumatic night, since peace and the avalanche demonstrated the importance of rivers and life.
Paper long abstract:
Since the signing of the peace agreement, the Andean-Amazonic department of Putumayo has experienced a traumatic post-agreement, since only in Putumayo more than 194 social leaders who defended environmental causes have been assassinated. Social initiatives such as the "Guardianas del agua del Putumayo" have raised alerts about this serious panorama of violence and environmental damage in times of climate crisis.
Using the contributions of feminist geography and the political ecology of emotions, the experience of the "Guardianas del agua del Putumayo" points out the importance of questioning the extractivism and militarism that have accompanied the history of the Colombian Amazonic region, emphasizing the consequences on the body of women in the contamination, excess, scarcity and dispossession of water at the hands of the armed actors of drug trafficking, mega-mining, oil extraction and deforestation.
The "Guardianas del agua del Putumayo" denounce sexual, physical, political, and psychological violence against women in the context of environmental struggles, but they also state that a fundamental part of their struggle is their spiritual strength, based on a healing relationship with the rivers and the conception of the local philosophy of "thinking beautiful ( Pensar Bonito- Suma Yuyay)", a philosophy that seeks to dialogue own notions of well-being and dignity, understanding that for the "Guardianas del agua del Putumayo" the defense of the territory is a process of recovery and daily spiritual healing against colonialism.
NGO-led community mobilization to address violence against women in urban India produced heterogenous community responses, ranging from remedial action to vigilante violence. We analyze contextual reasons for such responses and discuss implications for conceptualisations of power and violence.
Paper long abstract:
Mobilizing communities to provide safety and support for women facing risks of violence is a long-standing goal for feminist activists. Yet, evidence on community participation in the prevention of violence against women (VAW) remains scarce. We conducted a grounded theory study of community responses to an NGO programme to prevent VAW in informal settlements in Mumbai, India. We held 30 focus group discussions and 36 semi-structured interviews with 113 community members and 9 NGO staff, along with over 170 hours of field observation. We found that NGO-led community mobilization produced heterogeneous responses and identified three major strategies used by community members to address VAW: remedial action, institutional redress, and vigilante violence. Residents’ choice of strategy was interpretable with reference to their ecological context, in particular, factors such as extreme poverty, violent (sword- or gang-related) crime, and corrupt institutions, including the police. Remedial action became the default strategy in neighbourhoods with low levels of social capital. Institutional redress was favoured in neighbourhoods with strong institutions. Vigilante violence arose from the intersection of weak institutions combined with ample social capital. However, institutional redress did not necessarily equate to non-violence, as the police were widely reported to have used violence against offenders under arrest. We argue that these contextual features force VAW prevention programmes to take explicit ethical positions on contentious issues such as the legitimate use of violence by the state and caution against straightforward importation of Global Northern, 'social service-oriented' models of VAW prevention.
The paper interrogates and reveals some troubling aspects of this hegemonic construction of domestic violence, programmatic interventions, and its legal literacy framework of human rights practices.
Paper long abstract:
The proposed paper critically examines the contemporary “domestic violence” discourse. It discusses how it constructs “domestic violence” as an “object of knowledge” and its effects in Bangladesh. The paper contends that constructions of “domestic violence” discourse have fallen into the trap of universal knowledge production. It often constructs an objective truth about women’s experiences of domestic violence by emphasizing the singularity of their experiences. It also focuses on criminalizing domestic violence and producing knowledge within the dichotomy of victim and perpetrator. The paper will argue how such knowledge constructs a decontextualized subject where women are portrayed as “distinct victim” figures. However, the lens of “the practice of everyday life” provides a view of how such a construction of the subject is fraught. The paper illustrates how it is often difficult to unravel women’s struggles from the domestic and working contexts, where multiple structural inequalities constitute their everyday living, by citing examples from urban working-class women’s (often the target of human rights intervention) everyday experiences of living. Only focusing on women’s “victim” subjectivity often ignores the context and other myriads of structural violence that constitute their lives and subjectivities.
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