As with sexual assault, a critique of domestic violence has become a global feminist norm, the cornerstone of the broader concept of gender violence crafted by global feminists. For more than two centuries, women in the West and in Russia had fought for more rights within marriage, including the right to divorce to escape violence and control. Beginning in the 1960s in the West, battered women’s movements (also called shelter or refuge movements) re-articulated this struggle in terms of domestic violence. By the 1980s, such movements existed in thirty — five out thirty-six stable democracies, including a strong, autonomous movement in India (Weldon 2002, 77). As a result, domestic violence (or “family violence” or “abuses in the family”) was incorporated into the U. N. documents that condemn violence against women, such as the General Recommendations 12 and 19 from the Committee for the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (see appendix 1). Recently, domestic violence has been attached to European human rights norms, for example, by the Council of Europe.1
Consequently, as with sexual assault, these global and regional politics meant the availability of global norms from which feminist entrepreneurs and transnational feminist networks (TFNs) could draw to influence national governments.
Global intervention can be seen in how activists localize activism and remake the norms into the vernacular using models of raising awareness in other contexts. The norms may help certify domestic activism. Alliances between transnational feminists and human rights monitors may lead to the process of blaming and shaming that I analyzed in chapter 4. These political strategies may give meaning and muscle to international documents and international law.
More so than for rape, global feminist norms helped define domestic violence, a problem most societies had not historically criminalized. While their conception still varies, TFNs and human rights advocates concerned about domestic violence tend to share a focus on violence against women within the family or other interpersonal relationships. The forms or acts of domestic violence can be physical, psychological, or sexual:
from simple assaults to aggravated physical battery, kidnapping, threats, intimation, coercion, stalking, humiliating verbal abuse, forcible or unlawful entry, arson, destruction of property, sexual violence, marital rape, dowry or bride-price related violence, female genital mutilation, [and] violence related to exploitation through prostitution. (Coomaraswamy 1996, n. C.n)
Many activists make a distinction between domestic violence (by current or former boyfriends, husbands, or partners of adult women), which they see as a mechanism of gendered power, and other forms of violence within a family, such as child abuse, incest, or elder abuse.2 Some others, such as UNIFEM’s East and Southeast Asian regional office, make no such distinction but include economic violence, such as economic blackmail or control over the money a woman earns.
The global norms also elaborated a consensus on what needed to be done to combat domestic violence. First, the new global norm suggested that activists should work, for example, through the yearly 16 Days of Activism against Gender Violence Campaign, to raise awareness of the problem understood to be obfuscated by culture and tradition (Merry 2006a, ch. 1).3 Second, as spelled out in the 1993 Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women, states are called to provide social assistance, such as shelters and hotlines, to women subjected to violence. Third, as articulated in “A framework for model legislation on domestic violence” by the U. N.’s special rapporteur on violence against women, countries should adopt comprehensive legislation that allows for “flexible and speedy remedies (including remedies under special domestic violence legislation, penal and civil remedies)” (Coomaraswamy 1996, para. 2e). Specifically, the rapporteur called for criminalization of domestic violence, the establishment of ex parte restraining and protection orders, systematic law enforcement record keeping, training of police and judges, the recognition of victim’s testimony as sufficient evidence, and the provision of medical care and crisis intervention services to ensure health and safety of women facing domestic violence. This support was echoed by the next special rapporteur, who identified as crucial “specific legislation on domestic violence, providing for full protection of victims, unhindered access to medical, social and legal services, and for perpetrators to be held accountable” (Erturk 2006, 23).
Even as some skepticism emerged among North American activists (e. g., Matthews 1994; Coker 2004), prominent TFNs advocated a particular model to respond comprehensively to domestic violence, a coordinated community response. This structured collaboration, requiring state criminal justice and human service agencies to work with the women’s shelter movement, was developed by the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project in Duluth, Minnesota. While nodding to the need for adaptation, TFNs, such as the Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights, suggest some constants: the need to first develop a common understanding of domestic violence and the centrality of core intervention principles such as holding the offender, not the victim, legally accountable.4 This well-elaborated, U. S.- initiated model was particularly attractive to U. S.-based donors.