{"id":100862,"date":"2015-03-09T14:26:09","date_gmt":"2015-03-09T18:26:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=100862"},"modified":"2015-03-24T09:50:47","modified_gmt":"2015-03-24T13:50:47","slug":"violence-against-women-the-scope-and-strength-of-the-law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2015\/03\/violence-against-women-the-scope-and-strength-of-the-law\/","title":{"rendered":"Violence Against Women: The Scope and Strength of the Law"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"RichardsBook\"<\/a><\/div>\n

At the opening session of the Commission on the Status of Women in New York today, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon<\/a> noted that progress on gender equality remains \u201cunacceptably slow,\u201d and a UN analysis just released has found that violence against women and girls worldwide \u201cpersists at alarmingly high levels<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Just how the law, both international and domestic, protects women against violence is explored by UConn researcher David Richards in a new book, Violence Against Women and the Law<\/a><\/em> (Paradigm Publishers 2015).<\/p>\n

In the book Richards, an associate professor of political science who co-founded the largest human rights database<\/a> in the world more than a decade ago, provides a new set of analyses and scores focusing particularly on domestic laws protecting women against violence in 196 countries around the globe.<\/p>\n

Richards and coauthor Jillienne Haglund, a post-doctoral researcher at Washington University in St. Louis, looked at domestic laws in effect during the years 2007-2010. They rated laws addressing four types of gender-based violence: rape, domestic violence, sexual harassment, and marital rape.<\/p>\n

The authors looked not only at the presence of laws, but how they were used; how legal protections are related to economic, political, and social institutions; and whether international law drives the enactment of domestic legal protections.<\/p>\n

A sequence of violence<\/strong><\/p>\n

Richards\u2019 analyses show that almost all countries have some guarantee against rape, followed in sequence by domestic violence, sexual harassment, and finally marital rape, which was the least likely to be prohibited.<\/p>\n

However, he also found that even though many industrialized nations have strong laws regulating domestic violence, some have conspicuously few regulations on sexual harassment in the workplace.<\/p>\n

When you look at the number of ways that violence is perpetrated against women, combined with the frequency of that violence, and then you look at the economic toll and the health toll, individually and collectively, it\u2019s terrible on every level. — David Richards<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cWe found in a lot of industrialized democracies that sexual harassment was the last of the four types to be legally prohibited in public and private places,\u201d says Richards. \u201cLikely, the last thing wealthy countries want to do is regulate the marketplace. They\u2019ll regulate what goes on in a household before they put any regulations on employers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Richards\u2019 work also shows that the presence of women in the legislature makes a country more likely to have laws protecting women from violence. To those who study American politics, he says, this might not seem surprising, but internationally, it\u2019s heartening.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn American politics it\u2019s understood that women legislators do legislate on behalf of women\u2019s issues, and will represent their gender in law,\u201d Richards explains. \u201cBut internationally, there\u2019s an argument that the bulk of the women who end up in legislatures are elites, that feminists are weeded out at the level of nominations, and so there\u2019s not a process where women significantly affect the creation of legislation such as that aimed at gender-based violence.\u201d<\/p>\n

Respecting international laws <\/strong><\/p>\n

\"David<\/a>
David Richards, associate professor of political science and human rights, and co-founder of the CIRI Human Rights Data Project. (Dan Buttrey\/UConn photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Similarly, international human rights laws have been criticized as having no effect on individual countries\u2019 domestic laws. But, for example, Richards found that states party to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW<\/a>) are also more likely to have established full prohibitions on domestic violence. In a recent essay<\/a> he notes that the USA remains among a select few countries not to be party to CEDAW.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt this moment there are prominent scholars making the case that international human rights law doesn\u2019t work,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd there are others of us that strongly make the case that it does.\u201d<\/p>\n

International funding organizations like the World Bank often use data like Richards\u2019 in their decisions to allocate development assistance funding: they want to give money to places that are not human rights abusers, Richards notes, so getting a good score on his metrics can carry direct economic benefits.<\/p>\n

And certainly Richards\u2019 data from the book only scratches the surface, he readily admits; although his data assess the strength of laws, the way laws are interpreted by courts and enforced (or not) by law enforcement officials on a daily basis provide a steep measurement challenge that was beyond the scope of the book.<\/p>\n

For now, he hopes his work will help scholars look more closely at the effects of international law on domestic law, and will help spur conversations about how best to systematically audit the legal behavior of governments related to violence against women.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you look at the number of ways that violence is perpetrated against women, combined with the frequency of that violence, and then you look at the economic toll and the health toll, individually and collectively, it\u2019s terrible on every level,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo, what do you do about it?\u201d he asks. \u201cThe one thing I know how to do is to tell stories with numbers, so that\u2019s what I do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more about Richards\u2019 book and its findings in his recent Washington Post <\/em>\u201cMonkey Cage\u201d article.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A UConn human rights researcher discusses his new book on international and domestic laws to protect women against violence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":100868,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[88,2076,1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[63],"class_list":["post-100862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-global-affairs","category-research","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-11 06:22:59","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100862"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100862\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":101069,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100862\/revisions\/101069"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/100868"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100862"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=100862"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=100862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}