Political and Social Implications

Chapter 19 considers the political and social consequences of violence against women in politics. The implications of these acts reach far beyond their effects on individual victims, harming political institutions as well as society at large. First, attempting to exclude women as women from participating in political life undermines democracy, negating political rights and disturbing the political process. Second, tolerating mistreatment due to a person’s ascriptive characteristics infringes on their human rights, damaging their personal integrity as well as the perceived social value of their group. Third, normalizing women’s exclusion from political participation relegates women to second class citizenship, threatening principles of gender equality. The chapter concludes that naming the problem of violence against women in politics thus has important repercussions along multiple dimensions, making the defense of women’s rights integral to the protection of political and human rights for all.

Economic Violence

Chapter 15 provides an overview of economic forms of violence against women in politics. Economic violence employs economic hardship and deprivation as a means of control, most often by destroying a person’s property or harming their financial livelihood as a form of intimidation. Forms of economic violence include vandalism, property destruction, theft, extortion, raids to remove property, withholding of funds and resources, threats to terminate employment, withdrawal of financial support, and restrictions on access to funding. Despite direct links between economic violence and the ability of women to perform political functions, it remains a largely invisible phenomenon. Few women, indeed, appear willing to speak on the record about their experiences for fear of negative effects on their personal and professional livelihoods. Relative silence on these dynamics, in turn, means that few measures exist to address economic violence, with civil society largely filling the gap to provide emergency grants and accounting oversight.

Psychological Violence

Chapter 13 provides an overview of psychological forms of violence against women in politics. Psychological violence inflicts trauma on individuals’ mental state or emotional well-being. It seeks to disempower targets by degrading, demoralizing, or shaming them—often through efforts to instill fear, cause stress, or harm their credibility. These acts may occur inside and outside official political settings and be carried out in person, by telephone, or via digital means like email and social media. Experiencing it firsthand, targets (and their allies) have taken the lead in devising and sharing coping strategies, empowering individuals and mobilizing groups to call out psychological violence and counteract its pernicious effects.

Physical Violence

Chapter 12 provides an overview of physical forms of violence against women in politics. Physical violence encompasses a wide range of bodily harms involving unwanted contact and confinement resulting in death or injury. The tangible nature of these acts makes them the most widely recognized and least contested forms of violence against women. They tend to be relatively rare, however, with offenders opting for “less costly” means of violence before escalating to physical attacks. While legal redress may be a solution for at least some forms of physical violence, politically active women have developed a number of grassroots strategies to respond to and anticipate physical violence. At the same time, individual women and state actors have devised new preventive security arrangements, seeking to avert or mitigate the effects of physical attacks.

A Bias Event Approach

Chapter 10 develops an approach for identifying empirical cases of violence against women in politics. It begins by outlining methodological challenges related to under-reporting, comparisons, and intersectionality. The chapter argues that work on hate crimes offers a way forward, as this approach explicitly seeks to develop tools to ascertain whether bias against particular groups was a motivating factor behind a given crime. Because not all acts of violence against women in politics constitute crimes, the chapter proposes to focus instead on “bias events”: actions of both a criminal and non-criminal nature driven by bias against women in political roles. It then builds on existing legal guidance to propose six criteria for determining whether an incident was potentially motivated by bias.

An Expanded Vision

Chapter 4 notes that the concept of violence against women in politics—as it has emerged—has largely been restricted to actions perpetrated against women in elections and/or within formal political institutions. During this same period, however, parallel campaigns have emerged to draw attention to violence committed against women human rights defenders and against female journalists. Observing that these efforts take up highly similar issues concerning violence as a barrier to women’s participation in the political field, the chapter advocates joining these various streams to forge a more comprehensive concept of violence against women in politics, underscoring continuities across challenges faced by politically active women of all types.

Debates and Controversies

Chapter 7 applies a more critical, comparative lens to the developments discussed in previous chapters. It outlines a series of debates and controversies emerging from practitioner work, which have been subject at times to tense academic engagement, including disputes over terminology; violence against women or gender-based violence as the defining feature of this phenomenon; differing typologies and classifications of specific forms of violence; views on targets and perpetrators of violence; the presence of intersecting forms of violence based on race, class, age, and other identities; and contextual factors and their role in shaping incidents of violence. The chapter stakes out the position of this book in relation to each of these debates, providing a short summary of the ideas subsequently elaborated at length in the next part of the book.

International Recognition

Chapter 5 traces how the discussions outlined in previous chapters have become embedded in a growing number of international normative frameworks. The architecture surrounding the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) has provided one entry point. The CEDAW Committee raised the issue in a number of country reviews and issued several General Recommendations alluding to violence in the political sphere. A second pathway has been via the mandate of the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, who issued two reports on this topic in 2018. A third involves UN General Assembly resolutions, including a recent resolution identifying sexual harassment as a form of violence against women referencing violence in politics. The new International Labor Organization Convention Concerning the Elimination of Violence and Harassment in the World of Work serves as a fourth venue, filling important gaps related to sexual and online harassment in political spaces.

Parallel and Related Trends

Inductive development of the concept of violence against women in politics largely proceeded from an activist and practitioner space focused on the global South. Chapter 3 identifies incidents of political sexism and misogyny in other regions that helped propel recognition of violence against women in politics as a global phenomenon. It summarizes debates involving politically active women in other regions—including the global North—showing that this problem affects women across a range of different countries. One of these was the #MeToo movement that swept around the world in late 2017, which drew attention to sexual harassment within political institutions and highlighted that gender-based violence was not restricted to election-related events. The chapter goes on to show that these episodes have largely been folded into the work done by practitioners in the violence against women in politics field, helping to strengthen its recognition as a universal phenomenon.

Sexual Violence

Chapter 14 provides an overview of sexual forms of violence against women in politics. Sexual violence comprises a host of unwanted behaviors targeting a person’s sexuality and sexual characteristics, ranging from non-consensual physical contact to unwelcome verbal conduct of a sexual nature. Whether involving a single incident or a pattern of behavior, sexual violence violates human dignity, communicating a message of domination and disrespect. Employed to display, gain, or maintain power, sexual violence can also create a hostile work environment, interrupting and potentially undermining women’s labors and contributions. Recent interventions around the world, especially in the wake of the #MeToo movement, seek to deepen emerging understandings that sexual violence is pervasive but unacceptable in the political realm by working to raise awareness, pursue sanctions, and devise preventative measures to expose and combat sexual violence in its various forms.