Rudaw - Gill Hague is a Professor of Violence Against Women Studies and have worked on violence against women issues for nearly 40 years. She talked with Rudaw on the occasion of 8th March, the International Women's day.
" I work not only as an academic but also as an activist and practitioner on the issue. Our Gender and Violence Research Centre in Bristol, UK, conducts research both nationally and internationally on violence against women, developing new policies, services and understandings, evaluating new projects and working in many countries of the world. In all our work on violence against women, we try when we can to raise the voices of women and children who are being abused," says Hague.
She claims her centre is now one of the main sites of gender violence research in the UK and has an international standing. "Some examples of my own work are that recently I led the first-ever study of domestic violence and disabled women in the UK with subsequent recommendations for improving services and responses." Gill Hague is currently working in India and in Uganda on issues of gender violence and marriage, and have previously worked in Brazil, South Africa, Mexico and a wide variety of other countries, always taking the lead from colleagues in the countries concerned.
Twenty years ago, you set up a research group on violence against women. What motivated you to initiate such a research group?
For me, it has been a privilege to work on such an important subject for so long and to contribute to making the world safer for women and children – and for men too. I think that violence against women is a human subject, not just a women’s one, and that we will all lead more creative, fulfilled lives if the abuse of women and children is lessened and finally becomes a thing of the past -- so that all humans can enjoy fully the human right to not be abused by others.
We set up the Domestic Violence Research Group (DVRG) twenty years ago in Bristol in the UK (now the Centre for Gender and Violence Research which I just mentioned and which currently has about 20 researchers and includes participants from about 10 countries worldwide).
At the time when we started at the end of the 1980s, my colleague, Dr. Ellen Malos and I were active in the women’s movement of the time in the UK. The first domestic violence service in Bristol had actually been set up in Ellen’s house (because there was nowhere else at the time!). The idea of the DVRG was to provide research evidence to support the women’s organisations and the new attention to domestic violence at the time, so we took the plunge and set it up, working initially on research to improve housing options for women and children. We worked alongside the women’s and other organisations, providing help and research support, but for a long time it was a struggle to be taken seriously by other academics who didn’t see the abuse of women and children as something that needed study. Gradually, we built our reputation over the years, though, and now our importance is widely acknowledged and accepted. We have been very successful and presently are conducting research on impacts on children, on young people and relationship violence, forced marriage, honour-based violence, domestic violence against men, marriage customs, bride-price and dowries, prostitution, domestic violence and health, spiritual dimensions and intimate abuse, educating young children that violence is not acceptable and so on.
In your opinion, what has changed since then (the time when you set up the VAWRG)?
So much has changed it is hard to know where to begin. But at the same time so much has remained the same! All over the world, women and men have begun to combat gender-based violence.
For example to campaign against the abuse of women -- specifically including on grounds of family honour. To set up services. To educate people that the abuse of women is not acceptable and to get it accepted as a crime. To try and change cultural practices that harm women and children. To put in place policies and action plans. To make changes at United Nations level, but equally to change things for individual women and families in villages and cities across the world. There is scarcely a country n the world that is not doing something.
These changes are happening everywhere to different extents, including Kurdistan of course where you are making huge moves forward on these issues and are to be congratulated.
But on the other hand, violence against women remains a huge problem across the globe and terrible atrocities happen to the world’s women every day.
You are currently leading an investigation into HBV in Iraqi Kurdistan and inside the Kurdish Diaspora in the UK, what are the aims of these studies?
This is pioneering study funded by the Kurdistan Regional Government to whom we are very very grateful. We understand that this is part of an effort by the government to take on crimes which happen against women in the name of family honour and to say that such crimes should not happen in the twenty-first century.
The study aims to put in place an Action Plan in Kurdistan to combat honour based violence and honour killings -- which hopefully all the agencies and services in the country, as well as the people, will gradually feel able to support.
In your opinion, what is/are the difference between VAW and HBV?
VAW is a huge issue covering a wide range of abuses against women. These include domestic violence, honour based violence itself, rape and sexual assault, attempted murder and mutilation, forced suicide, forced prostitution and trafficking of women, female genital mutilation, femicide and female infanticide, and so on. HBV is one part of this widespread pattern of the abuse of women by men with whom they are intimate or who are family members.
The World Health Organisation tells us that between one in five and one in three of the world’s women experience violence from their husbands and family members. One in three of the world’s women....this is a terrible statistic and one which we cannot tolerate in the modern world.
Women are also seen as the ones to keep the family honour and if things go wrong are often blamed and punished in some way to avoid the family being shamed. This is when violence happens in the name of honour and crimes are committed against women in this name.
I think it is very hard to see how extreme violence against a woman, even her stoning to death, can go hand in hand with any concept of ‘honour’ in the true meaning of the word as something precious, to be treasured and respected and a source of human dignity.
We hope that our project which is being led by Kurdish experts and is collaboration between the Universities of Roehampton and Bristol in the UK and a Kurdish women’s organisation will lead to new policies, education programs, training for professionals and coordinated action. The aim of all of these actions and possible policy developments will be, we hope, to try to eradicate the way ideas about family honour are used as a reason for violence against women and lead to physical attacks, fear, terror, banishment, damage, suicide, and possible murder for its women victims.
What are your preliminary findings? Our findings are very preliminary but it is clear there is still a large amount of honour based violence in Kurdistan and that change is needed. There have been some policy developments in the UK on this issue which might be helpful but both Kurdistan and the UK still have a long way to go, in our view.
When will you make public the final findings?
We hope that we will have a Summit Meeting in Kurdistan to bring together all interested parties and the government and to come up with an Action Plan. This will probably happen later in 2010 or early 2011. If the government is able to do this, it will hopefully be ground-breaking and we congratulate all concerned on trying to make a difference in Kurdistan on honour-based violence.
We hope that real change will come and that no more women will die at the hands of their families in the name of honour. It has been encouraging to see how many people and organisations in Kurdistan share this hope.
© Rudaw
