The new link between violence against women and human rights also enlisted human rights monitors already active on other issues, such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Despite early assertions that rights could not be denied based on sex (e. g., in the U. N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights), most human rights advocates had considered women’s rights as “special interests” even while considering violations that impacted a smaller part of the population—such as ethnic minorities—as “general interests” (Bunch 1995, 12—15). As gender violence activists succeeded in altering the U. N.’s terrain, the major international human rights organizations also began to shift their understanding.
In postcommunist Europe and Eurasia, the human rights advocate that has focused the most attention on violence against women as a violation of women’s human rights is the Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights (MAHR). By 1993, MAHR had established a Women’s Program that “works to improve the lives of women by using international human rights standards to advocate for women’s rights in the United States and around the world.”2 Using conventional human rights tactics, conducting field research working with local women’s organizations, MAHR published a series of reports documenting state failures to respond to domestic violence, mostly in postcommunist Europe and Eurasia. In 2000, MAHR joined up with the U. N.’s Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) and the Open Society’s Women’s Program to establish a Stop Violence Against Women campaign centered around a website in English and Russian.3
MAHR’s work and their Stop Violence Against Women campaign illustrates the new global feminist approach to gender violence. The homepage proclaims that MAHR sees “violence against women as one of the most pervasive human rights abuses worldwide.”4 The campaign focuses on domestic violence, sexual violence, sexual harassment, and trafficking in women, framing each as a human rights issue. The campaign website, which has a collection of country pages summarizing current legislation and developments and links to important international documents on gender violence and human rights, reflects MAHR’s commitment to monitoring states using human rights standards. The website also demonstrates MAHR’s goal of raising awareness of women’s rights through providing information and encouraging educational programs. Imagined as a resource for activists from Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the campaign represents MAHR’s dedication to working with local women’s activists, who they assume will be organized into NGOs, independent and voluntary associations of individuals working together to provide social services and advocate for change. As part of their commitment to this local organizing and to reform of policy and practice, the website includes a summary of what are seen as “best practices” and training materials. In contrast to some human rights advocates, MAHR also brings a new kind of (global feminist) reflexivity. For example, in 2004, they turned their tools back on the United States, releasing a report on the local response to domestic violence against refugee and immigrant women in the Minneapolis—St. Paul area of Minnesota.
The global feminist re-imagining of violence against women as a violation of women’s human rights also had consequences beyond the human rights community. For example, by 2000, the new attention brought the inclusion of gender — based violence as a health problem by the World Health Organization. Although such language was not included in the original document establishing the U. N.’s Millennium Development Goals, global feminists succeeded in getting condemnation of violence against women in the 2005 conference document. By the late 1990s, violence against women had been incorporated almost everywhere: by the leading intergovernmental agencies (e. g., the United Nations, the International Organization for Migration, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe), by Western governments’ international development agencies, and by virtually all large foundations open to funding initiatives focused on women. The potential for influence, especially for re-imagining issues pertaining to women, was so great that feminist observers began to see gender violence activism as potentially a new form of imperialism (e. g. Hemment 2004a; 2007).