- BPW International - BPW California will hold-BPW Violence Against Women Conference -

The programmatic content and financial leadership for this effort derive from is a working partnership of Los Angeles area clubs of five international women’s service organizations that are part of an international program for women called Project Five-0, (Soroptimist International, Zonta, Business and Professional Women International, American Association of University Women, International Council of Women) and the Southern California Chapter of UNIFEM.

The partner group will invite business and business organizations, not for profit organizations and groups, government agencies, community groups, men’s service organizations, and others to work as collaborators with us on the development of the content for the event and to ensure that the event attracts those who are accountable to the population of affected women and who have the authority to drive needed change in what is available and accessible to the affected population in the Los Angeles area. The partner group will work to establish the priorities for the way forward with the workshop participants.

All partners and collaborators will receive, and be asked to review, an electronic copy of the 2006 United Nations Secretary General’s In-depth study of all forms of violence against women.

Use the findings and recommendations of the 2006 United Nations Secretary General’s Report on Violence against Women and the findings and recommendations of reports dealing with this problem in the Los Angeles area to identify opportunities for improvement in the resource deployment in place to prevent, detect, prosecute, repress and assist the victim survivors of violence against women In the Los Angeles area.

If surplus funds are available from the event, we will organize project(s) to implement the priority improvements developed.

Policy Summit Content and Format

Format: Each registrant will be asked to provide an e-mail address where they can receive a copy of the 2006 United Nations Secretary General’s In-depth study of all forms of violence against women and related documents.

Anticipated Composition: Participants who can contribute to the knowledge base for this issue and develop prioritized recommendations for the improvement of the system to prevent, intervene, and prosecute these offences and to assist the survivors.

Overview
Waste is an issue in private business, public business and in the management of assets at the macro economic level. Organized performance management frameworks enable organizations to assure the accomplishment of organizational strategy and to control and avoid effectiveness and efficiency losses attributable to waste. This goal requires a deliberate effort to develop the problem-solving skills of all workers involved in the production of value for the service or product consumer.

Efforts to end the perpetration of violence on women can be envisioned, in a human rights framework, as focused action against the waste of the talent, health, social potential, economic potential, human capital formation, and rational contributions of those women, who, if they survive the violence, are victimized, stigmatized and suppressed by that violence. This waste of talent, rationality, and human productivity is no less pernicious than the waste of resources intended to deliver performance in public and private entities and in local and national economies.

This waste has a cumulative effect, harming the economic productivity, social and educational status, health, and mental health of families over many generations. This violence not only begets violence but also drives violence enabling behavior that, going forward impoverishes families, their communities and set the conditions for violence to beget more violence. These enabling behaviors include public corruption, impunity, and the reinforcement of violence as an acceptable way to solve problems or resolve disputes.

This study and its report were completed in response to United Nations resolution 58/185. The report defined violence against women as gender-based violence, which impairs or nullifies the enjoyment by women of human rights and fundamental freedoms under international law or under human rights conventions. Gender-based violence is defined as violence directed against a woman because she is a woman, or violence that impacts a woman disproportionately including acts that inflict physical, mental, or sexual harm or suffering, threats of such acts, coercion, and other deprivations of liberty.

This violence against women occurs in public and private, custodial and conflict, in workplace and educational, and in sport settings. That it occurs in so many settings suggests that there is a level of acceptance of this behavior that results in perpetrators feeling that they can act with impunity.

So, women are at risk for violence and men are at risk for perpetrating this violence, whether out of ignorance, culturally supported impunity, or acting out the examples of behavior or unequal power relationships seen in their homes and families.

Some groups of women suffer more than others because of some combination of factors that may include accident of birth, where they live and the values of the adults who surround them during their formative years. For example, on the reservation, American Indians annually experience seven sexual assaults per 1000 residents compared to three per 1000 among African-Americans and two per 1000 among whites. Other women, whom most would “never” think to be prey or conforming to violence, suffer in the same isolation as women who were raised vulnerable to violence precisely because they are not presumed to be a victim “type.”

A 2006 report from the United States Justice Department reflects that nationally, the reported incidences of domestic violence have fallen by more than half since 1993. Violent assaults, rapes, homicides and robberies against women dropped from around 10 per 1,000 women in 1993 to 4 per 1,000 women in 2004. There is lack of agreement on the causes for this decline in reported violence. The two-year study found that reported intimate partner violence represents nearly 25 percent of violent crime against women, and that women who were separated from their spouses or divorced reported the highest incidences of abuse.

A 2003 report on violence against women in California during the period 1992 to 1999 includes data on Intimate partner physical violence (IPPV) and general violence to women. Key findings include:

In 1998 and 1999, nearly six percent of California women, or about 620,000 women per year, experienced violence or physical abuse by their intimate partners.
In 1998 and 1999, IPPV occurred in more than 436,000 households per year in which children were also present, potentially exposing about 916,000 children to violence in the home each year.
Nearly one in five women who went hungry some time in the past year because they did not have enough money to buy food was also an IPPV victim.
During the eight-year period 1992-99, about 563 women per year were murdered.
Women were killed with firearms more often than any other type of weapon.
Female-victim homicides declined by 40 percent between 1992 and 1999.
Black women were more likely to be victims of homicide than women in any other race group.
Hospitals billed charges of $44.9 million per year from 1992-99 for in-patient treatment of violent injuries to women.
Although firearms were not the most common cause of hospitalized violent injuries among women, they were the most expensive, with billed charges averaging $12.2 million per year.

This report did not address trafficking, mutilation, forced marriage or slavery.

Year 2000 survey findings in the report Women’s Health: Findings from the California Women’s Health Survey, 1997-2003 on the prevalence of Intimate Partner and Domestic Violence (IPP-DV) indicates that:

A little over 40 percent of California women experienced IPP-DV in their lifetime.
Approximately 12 percent of women reported sexual assault by an intimate partner in their lifetime.
class="font-normal"> The four-year average IPP-DV prevalence estimate was 5.8 percent (95 percent confidence interval, 5.4-6.2 percent) (data not shown). Thus, on the average, approximately 608,100 California women 18 years of age and older experienced IPP-DV each year.
class="font-normal"> Higher IPP-DV rates were seen among Black/African American (8.5 percent) and Hispanic (7.9 percent) women compared with White (5.0 percent) and Asian/Other (4.8 percent) women (Table 12-2).
Younger women (18-24 years of age) (11.0 percent) and those who had been pregnant in the past five years (11.7 percent) or were living with children younger than 18 years of age (8.3 percent) had higher rates of IPP-DV than their counterparts.
Level of education was inversely related with prevalence of IPP-DV. That is, women with lower education levels tended to report higher prevalence of IPP-DV than women with higher education.
Additionally, respondents who had the following socioeconomic characteristics also had higher IPP-DV prevalence rates:
- those enrolled in the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) Supplemental Nutrition Program (16.8 percent);
- women without health insurance coverage (10.4 percent);
- women with lower annual household income (6.5 percent);
- those with more than three people in the household (7.7 percent); and
- unmarried women (7.8 percent).
IPP-DV experience also appears to be associated with adverse health indicators. Respondents who indicated they were in excellent or good health had lower prevalence of IPP-DV (5.4 percent) than those in poor or fair health (8.0 percent).
Respondents who said they felt overwhelmed in the previous 30 days very often or often had higher IPP-DV prevalence rates (16.3 percent) than those who did not report feeling overwhelmed (2.4 percent).
Respondents who at first sexual intercourse were 17 years of age or younger had higher rates of IPP-DV (9.4 percent) than those who were older (3.5 percent).

There was no mention of trafficking or female slavery, mutilation, or forced marriage in this report.