Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-02-01-Speech-3-168"
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"en.20060201.17.3-168"2
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Mr President, the issue of men’s violence against women is not a small issue on the fringe of society. It is everywhere and it affects the whole of society directly and indirectly. I am grateful for what I perceive to be a growing understanding of the scope of this problem. I want to thank my fellow MEPs in the Committee on Women’s Rights and Equal Opportunities for the valuable help and support I received during this work. I am also pleased that Commissioner Franco Frattini has shown a strong and honest commitment. We now have a serious opportunity to recognise all women who have experienced violence but not justice.
The cornerstone of my report is that we need correct figures. At EU level there are no reliable studies. However, three national prevalence studies in Finland in 1999, Sweden in 2001 and Germany in 2004, indicate that previous assessments have vastly underestimated the extent of the problem. Using the United Nations’ definition of violence against women, these studies show that 40 to 50% of women in these three countries have, at some point in their lives, been subjected to violence by a man. I should like to emphasise that: between 40 and 50% of all women between the age of 16 and 67. The corresponding figure for the whole of the EU would be incredibly high, at between 80 and 100 million women.
Obviously effective measures must be based on correct facts and figures and the need for similar studies in other Member States is urgent. The magnitude of the problem in itself indicates that all Member States are repeatedly violating the basic rules of civil liberties and the rule of law on a scale that we have yet to understand. You may think this an exaggeration. It is not.
I would like to invoke a classic liberal. More than 300 years ago, the British philosopher, John Locke, introduced a fundamental idea: a government should be regarded as a tool for the defence of fundamental rights, the most fundamental civil right being the right to life and physical safety. This is the moral, normative basis for the state and its reason for being. Citizens agree to obey the laws, but this presupposes that the state fulfils its basic commitment to protect the lives, freedom and property of its citizens. Any state which fails in this task has broken the contract. When it comes to violence against women, the failure is measurable in all Member States of the Union. All violence is a challenge to our civilisation and to the rule of law. But men’s violence against women is a specific challenge to the contract of which all common policy is an expression.
There is a systematic difference in the way crimes of violence are treated, depending on the gender of the victim. Violence against men typically happens in public, perpetrated by another man, often a stranger. Violence against women typically happens in private, perpetrated by a man known to the woman, very often a man with whom the woman has or has had a relationship. The most crucial difference, politically, is that private violence against women is not prosecuted as seriously as public violence against men. The issue of men’s violence against women is not a small issue on the fringe of society, there is also a history.
Violence in the street from a stranger, primarily affecting men, has been a criminal offence in Europe for centuries, but it is quite recent that violence occurring in the home was made a criminal offence. Well into the latter part of the 20th century, Europe had many laws which excused domestic violence by men against women. This legacy lives on in our Union. We can see it in case law, attitudes and perceptions about the less serious nature of private violence.
The issue of men’s violence against women is not a small issue on the fringe of society. Men’s violence against women has also been a way of keeping men, in general, in power.
When the UN General Assembly in 1993 adopted the declaration on the elimination of violence against women, it was the first time a UN document had placed men’s violence against women in a gender-power perspective. It explicitly links violence to the superior position of men. What we need to do now is to act. First get the figures right and then proceed to the proper solutions. The issue of men’s violence against women is not a small issue on the fringe of society, it affects us all. I demand zero tolerance of men’s violence against women."@en1
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