It's Time to Stop Torture

Women & Girls: Targets of Torture

1. Overview 2. Children 3. Corporal Punishment 4. Impunity 5. Juvenile Justice 6. Sexual Identity 7. Women & Girls

PHOTO: On August 20, 2000, three men broke into a Romani home in Zilina, northern Slovakia, and beat Anastazia Baláñova and her daughters with baseball bats. Anastazia died three days later. Although the authorities reacted promptly in this case, the general failure of the state to prosecute those responsible for anti-Romani violence has contributed to an atmosphere in which racist violence against Roma has spread. In this photo, Anastazia Baláñova's sister-in-law holds her blood-stained nightdress. © Julie Denesha

The following is the testimony of a Guinean woman arrested during a peaceful demonstration in December 1998:

"I was arrested at 2pm... I was beaten, I got 40 lashes. At 2am the next morning, the soldiers came to beat us again, and after the beatings, three soldiers took us away... One soldier said that if I agreed to it, they would let me go. When I refused, they took out a gun and put it behind my ears, then on my chest, then they started on me... they raped me until I lost all sense of where I was. I spent four days there with the other women... then my mother paid for me to be released. I had to go to hospital for some serious treatment but still now as I talk to you I feel completely lost..."

Guinean authorities have not taken any steps to investigate this woman's story. No one has been brought to justice for these crimes.

Around the world women suffer extreme physical and emotional harm inflicted by people who have power over them, including police, soldiers, village leaders and their own fathers and husbands. All too often this suffering occurs because governments have failed to take basic steps necessary to protect women from physical and sexual abuse such as investigating allegations and bringing the torturers to justice.

Discrimination -- The basis for the torture of women

The torture of women is rooted in a global culture that denies women equal rights with men, and legitimizes the violent appropriation of women's bodies for individual gratification or political ends.

In recent decades, significant advances have been made by women's groups and other human rights activists around the world. Yet women worldwide still earn less than men, own less property than men, and have less access to education, employment and health care. Pervasive discrimination continues to deny women full political and economic equality with men.

Violence against women feeds off this discrimination and serves to reinforce it. When women are abused in custody, when they are raped by armed forces as 'spoils of war', when they are bought and sold as trafficked women, bonded labourers or in forced marriages, when they are terrorized by violence in the home, unequal power relations between men and women are both manifested and enforced. The torture of women will not be eradicated until discrimination on the grounds of gender is addressed.

Violence against women is compounded by discrimination on the grounds of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, social status, class and age. Poor and socially marginalized women are particularly liable to torture and ill-treatment. Such multiple discrimination further restricts women's choices, increases their vulnerability to violence, and makes it even harder for them to gain redress.

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Intimidate, control, punish

Sometimes the perpetrators of these acts of violence are state officials, such as police, prison guards or soldiers. Sometimes they are members of armed groups fighting against the government. However, much of the violence faced by women is at the hands of the people with whom they share their lives, whether as members of their family, of their community or as their employers. There is an unbroken spectrum of violence that women face at the hands of men who exert control over them.

Police and other state agents inflict torture not only in order to extract confessions, but also to instil profound dread in victims, to break their will, to punish them and to demonstrate the power of the perpetrators. Similar purposes characterize torture in the family or community. The perpetrators may seek to intimidate women into obedience, to punish them for bringing shame and dishonour on male relatives, or to assert their power over them.

The effects of violence and torture are physically and psychologically devastating, whether inflicted by private individuals or agents of the state. For example, women are traumatized and injured by rape, wherever the crime takes place. The medical consequences include psychological trauma, wounds, unwanted pregnancies, infertility and life-threatening diseases.

The responsibilities of every state

Violence against women, especially sexual violence in marriage, is still often viewed as a private or individual matter separate from the responsibility to protect civil and political rights. However, the fact that perpetrators of violence against women in the home and community are private individuals does not mean that the state can escape responsibility. If the state fails in its duty to protect women from abuses and to punish the perpetrators, it shares responsibility, whether the abuses take place in custody, in armed conflict or in the victim’s home. The international community has explicitly recognized violence against women as a human rights issue involving state responsibility.

A government fails to fulfil its legal obligations to protect women from torture and ill-treatment:

• When its own personnel directly participate in committing acts of violence, including rape and sexual violence by the police and the military of women and girls in their custody, and the use of rape as a weapon of war in armed conflict situations.
• When it condones these acts of violence by not doing anything about them and allows the existence of certain laws or practices that facilitate such acts of violence. This includes situations where the state encourages or tolerates killings of or violence against women for reasons of ÉChonour”.
• When it fails to punish those who commit these acts of violence and fails to take effective measures to prevent them because of a lack of political will despite the powers vested upon it.

Focusing in this way on the obligations of the state does not subtract in any way from the need to hold individual perpetrators accountable for their actions. In every case, the perpetrators must be fairly tried and punished for their crimes.

During the Campaign against Torture, Amnesty International is challenging governments to protect women from acts of violence, whether these acts are committed by state agents or by private citizens. Amnesty International considers that acts of violence against women in the home or the community contitute torture for which the state is accountable when: a) they are of the nature and severity envisaged by the concept of torture in international standards and b) the state has failed to fulfil its obligation to provide effective protection.

Governments must:

• take effective measures to prevent the torture and ill-treatment of women
• investigate all allegations of violence against women
• bring alleged perpetrators to justice through fair proceedings
• ensure that perpetrators receive adequate sentences
• provide the women who have suffered these crimes with adequate compensation and other forms of redress.

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