27 November 2024 / VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN AND GIRLS, SEX DISCRIMINATION

Elimination of violence against women and girls

UN Women IDEVAW 2024

UNSEEN Posts from individual SEEN members who need to remain anonymous.

Our duty and our honour: what can we as public servants do to stop violence against women and girls?

“Entrenched patriarchy at almost every level of society, combined with a rise in misogyny that permeates the physical and online world, is denying thousands of women and girls across the UK the right to live in safety, free from fear and violence.”

- Reem Alsalem, the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, London, 21 February 2024

November is a solemn month. Darkness, cold, heaviness, fatigue. We trudge through dead leaves and deadlines. On the 11th November, the knell of Remembrance Day forces us to visualise the horror of violence and the long reach of grief. Slog through two more weeks and we reach the 25th November, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women and Girls. Whether it’s the split second of the bomb explosion or the slower stealth of the thousand acts of violence which can cripple women’s lives, we remember how fragile we humans are. And we try to puzzle out again that insane equation: the enormous effort and love we give to birth and raise every human compared to how easily a life can be destroyed.

At this time of remembering, colleagues and I have been reflecting also about why we became public servants. It comes down to this: we love life. In the dark of November, let’s remember the honour we have in being entrusted to take care of the people of the UK. And so, we look forward with hope to the sixteen days of world action for women and girls that the 25th November begins.

Let us use this opportunity to focus our minds on what I believe should be integral to our ethics as public servants: that we must consciously work for the rights, safety and dignity of women and girls. As Reem Alsalem set out so forensically in her recent UN report (link below), the UK has come far in establishing rights for women, at least on paper, and yet, in 2024, we can look around us any day and despair. We still live in a society where male violence against women and girls, in all its many forms, is widespread and often taken for granted.

Yes, we think first about the violence at home, which may come from our fathers, husbands or brothers, and we remember the violence from the stranger in the street. But our culture where violence against women and girls, usually from males, is tolerated, is also shaped by our state structures and our roles, as public servants, within those structures.

We as public servants take thousands of policy and operational decisions every week which form what happens in our schools, our hospitals, our laws, our job centres, our immigration systems, our social security systems, our police, our prisons and probation services, our care homes, our housing estates, our family courts, our women’s refuges, our foreign aid. The decisions we make can deter or enable male violence. Our institutions and systems can be structures of care and safety, or they can condemn women and girls to more insecurity and fear.

None of us looks lovingly at a new baby girl and imagines she will grow up to be the girl sexually assaulted by the boys in her class at school, the teenager forced into prostitution to pay her rent, the mother struggling to raise her children while sinking deeper into debt or having her children taken away because she can’t protect them from her violent boyfriend, the woman in prison with a drug addiction or suicidal in a mental hospital because she can’t cope with her traumatic memories. Or is she just that quiet little woman in the office whom you barely notice, who lives a small life scared by her own shadow, wondering when a man will rape her again?

We as public servants must insist on noticing that quiet little woman, and all the other women and girls who live and die under violence. We refuse to accept violence as normal. It is our duty and our honour as public servants, whether male or female, to see violence and to act on it.

So let’s not just view equality for women and girls as another tick box on an equality impact assessment, that we go through the motions with ‘because of that PSED training’. There can never be equality for women and girls while we continue to build misogyny and violence into our culture. Today and every day, let every one of us look at how we do our jobs and see what we can do better for women and girls and so make our society better for everyone.

We hope you will find some inspiration from the links below, including the good example of our colleagues at the Youth Justice Board. Over the next fortnight, on the SEEN website and ‘X’, we will highlight more of the positive work being done by our colleagues: please do contact us with links to examples.

Links:

You can see here our articles for IDEVAWG from 2023 and 2022:

Cover art from the United Nations.