Gender Equality in Times of Conflict: Violence, Human Rights and Peacekeeping
Authors: Dutta Mondira , Odera Josephine , Tarkhanova Oleksandra , Taylor Sarah , O'Riordan Tamsine 
Published: October 2022

Springer Nature is proud to host a virtual event that brings together four scholars and practitioners across different regions to speak on gender equality in times of conflict. Coinciding with the International Day of Peace, we aim for this panel to highlight the impact of conflict on gender-based violence, and vice versa; how conflict affects the struggle for women's rights; and women's role in peacekeeping.

This webinar will be held at 7am PDT, 10am EDT, 3pm BST, 7:30pm IST, 10pm CST

Trafficking of women and girls during conflict and disasters

When a conflict or a natural hazard occurs, the impact of the misery is not uniformly distributed. The effect shows completely diverse results even among people who are demographically homogeneous. Disasters actually fortify and enhance gender inequality. It simply makes a bad situation worse. Disasters or a crisis like conflict, ethnic cleansing and war, are all found to facilitate and enable the environment for further abuse and forced confinement. The circumstances present a perfect situation facilitating implementation of weak law mechanisms and poverty vulnerability. This is an ideal situation for creating targets for exploitation and enslavement! Traffickers are quick to encash such opportune moments to trap their victims with ease and ‘make hay while the sun shines’!

Trafficking of women and children has emerged as the most lucrative illegal trade among human rights violators. The Palermo protocol defines trafficking in clear terms. It is the exploitation of women and children under the garb of fraudulent marriages, false job promises, culture, religious beliefs and deceit, etc. Unfortunately, most of the cases in human trafficking are prevalent in areas which are reeling under abject poverty and people belong to the most vulnerable category.

Regions that are in the grip of extreme poverty, human rights violation, natural hazards, conflict-ridden or war torn have exacerbated the risk and vulnerability of women and children making them fall prey to trafficking. Besides searching for livelihood options, the world today witnesses a mass exodus of people trying to wriggle out from what was their home once upon a time due to some crisis like a conflict, war, natural calamities, ethnic cleansing, terrorism, insurgency and so on. Human trafficking therefore flourishes amidst communities who are the most vulnerable. Studies show, more than 80 percent of the displaced population during the last ten years lived in Asia and a large segment was displaced due to such a crisis. In fact sometimes disasters occurred in such quick succession that people could hardly get time to recover before the second one occurred.

The mitigation strategy adopted for disaster risk reduction needs to be people centric imbibing protection mechanisms for the vulnerable. Those who struggle to free themselves from the trail of miseries that the disaster leaves behind particularly on gender based violence, human rights and Violence against Women. The Sendai Framework for DRR and the 17 interlinked Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are an outcome of interconnected social and economic processes targeting 2030 for achieving its goals. As such, there is a synergy between the two policy instruments. Thus disaster mitigation and sustainable development goals are perfectly interconnected. A lack of disaster mitigation will result in imbalanced development which will then fall short off in achieving the 2030 development agenda.

Although one of the major causes of gender inequality is lack of awareness and existing structural rigidities. This is what grips the women to remain confined to their gender stereo typed roles. However the main limitation for addressing issues in relation to violence against women is the dearth of reliable data on the subject. The estimates on the magnitude of trafficked victims of women and girls are uncertain due to lack of documentation and methodological flaws. Without a reliable statistics the magnitude are never accepted as authentic. Research studies in this field is more of a qualitative nature. The normal regular process of data collection is arduous and difficult due to the clandestine nature of operations, besides the anonymity demanded by the clientele. There is always a stigma attached for women and girls who had been trafficked and sexually abused. Hence they would never like to be pinpointed and come out openly making conviction process for the traffickers impossible. The Goal number 5 under the Sustainable Development Goals, targets to achieve gender equality and empowerment of all women and girls. Gender equality is not only a fundamental human right, but a necessary foundation for a peaceful, prosperous and sustainable world. The UN has defined 9 targets and 14 indicators for SDG 5. It has been attested that societies which value women and men as equal, are safer and healthier.

The methodological weaknesses continue to prevail in estimating the number of trafficked victims. The data collected are always under the scanner and are questionable. Hence most of the research studies tend to be based on either case studies or research based on case studies. Nevertheless it has been observed that trafficking of women and girls as one of the criminal activities has increased manifold over the years. It is apparent that under such situation, the magnitude of human trafficking is difficult to estimate. Regular data collection mechanisms simply don’t work due to the stealthy nature of operations. The low visibility of exploitation besides the desired anonymity by clientele, as well as an overwhelming fear of information sharing by involved persons makes it all difficult for visualizing and acquiring the correct picture of Violence Against Women (VAW). Therefore the magnitude of trafficked victims are always uncertain due to lack of documentation and methodological flaws. The TIP report to some extent attempts to assess gender equality by focusing to capture the successful ways of communities that addressed human trafficking proactively and documented how national governments further supported and empowered them. At present India is in Tier 2 of the TIP report since 2019.

Despite the weak documentation process, one cannot ignore the mass scale trafficking of orphan children during the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the drought of 2011 and famine in the Horn of Africa, the 2013 typhoon in the Philippines, the 2016 Hurricane Matthew, and so on. South Asia, similarly has many of the trafficked victims who are not claimed by anyone in the several jails of India, Bangladesh and Pakistan. In most cases, their families back home are either eliminated in disasters or are untraceable due to some conflict. Several such examples are witnessed frequently following a disaster/conflict such as in Maldives, Nepal, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan and Afghanistan and now Ukraine as well. Every day such incidents are on the increase. Therefore disaster/conflict and human trafficking are like two sides of the same coin. Although they are not visible side by side but can produce gender violence with horrendous impact. Although they are closely related but research and strategic actions are studied independently. Such studies are multi-disciplinary in nature and need a multi-pronged approach. As a stand-alone subject, it defeats the very purpose of addressing issues of gender violence, women’s rights and Violence against women.

Gender-based violence in conflict

The last half century has been particularly significant for institutional, policy and legal progress on Gender Equality. The adoption of CEDAW in 1979, the UN Declaration on VAW in 1993, UNSCR 1325 in 2000, UNSCR 1820 amongst a host of other laudable efforts have laid a foundation on which we continuously seek to build. In the face of conflict, however, the scourge of SGBV and its cost to humanity and development compels us to keep raising the bar as part and parcel of achieving gender equality. The SDGs stand-alone goal on gender equality is comprehensive and potentially transformative from both a rights and empowerment perspective. With 2030 in sight, how best can we clinch the promise of transformed lives for those affected by SGBV in conflict, particularly for rural and conflict affected populations in Africa? This presentation considers some of the issues, the frameworks and the setbacks in the light of GE and SGBV. Spurred by recent experience in the field, we ask the questions: Are the foundations solid enough or do we need to step back and repair any cracks? Can the SDGs, while they remain significant in their influence on global actors, development frameworks, policy makers and practitioners, land us in safety from SGBV in less than the ten years left for their implementation? The presentation does not seek to provide answers but to contribute to the debate.

Effects of the Russian invasion on women’s rights in Ukraine

The full-scale Russian invasion that started on February 24, 2022, led to confirmed deaths of over five thousand civilians, with the actual number being several times higher due to the Russian occupation of many heavily affected areas. Besides that, a quarter of the Ukrainian population was forced to leave their homes, including half of the Ukrainian children. The war violates fundamental human rights, such as the right to life, liberty, and safety and dramatically affects the lives of men and women, yet often in different ways. In this talk, I will focus on the effects of the war on women’s rights. Specifically, I will address how women in Ukraine face the triple burden of working, caring, and volunteering under unprecedented circumstances of the war. Women in Ukraine are active and formally equal participants in the economic sphere, and they carry a disproportionate burden of caring responsibilities, especially under the current conditions of homeschooling. Women with children are more often forcibly displaced, including abroad, so they become sole carers and providers in a foreign country. Finally, women are actively involved in various volunteering activities – from fighting on the frontlines to procuring military equipment and humanitarian aid for conscripted relatives and friends to volunteering on the community level in countless initiatives. As one of my interlocutors puts it, this “work-life-war balance” already significantly affects women’s health, time, and economic resources. This effort often made by women in conflicts across the globe is, unfortunately, just as often forgotten or dismissed after the war ends. Besides achieving a common victory, women activists in Ukraine are trying to ensure that this contribution is acknowledged and recognized.

Women's role in building and sustaining peace

"Women, Peace and Security" (WPS) has been an official part of global efforts to build and maintain peace for more than two decades. But what does this work truly entail? What expectations do we have of women in peace talks, in peacekeeping operations, in conflict prevention? As the international community confronts complex crises like those in Afghanistan and Ukraine, how do we understand the concrete implications of WPS work? This presentation lays out some of these questions in more detail, providing insights from these and other crisis settings.