Welcome
Welcome. Thank you all for being here tonight, on behalf of the UC Berkeley School of Public Health.
Good evening, I'm Will Dow, the interim Dean of this school and we are thrilled to be here today with the
East Bay launch of Every Woman Treaty and I understand it's not only the East Bay we're doing these on the
UC Berkeley campus but it's also the Bay Area and the California launch of the Every Woman Treaty effort
So you can tell your kids in just a few years
That you were here that night in Berkeley when the Every Woman campaign was won
At that time it seemed like a Don Quixote quest
But here we are just a few years later
And we not only have an international treaty addressing violence against women, but one that was proudly signed
by our first woman president
of the United States.
(audience laughing)
- Yay.
- That's where we envision
being in a few years.
We are thrilled that tonight we will learn
how to get from here to there,
at least one important step
along that campaign.
To create a context for
our discussion tonight,
I just want to note that the
World Health Organization
estimates that for women
between the ages of 15 and 44,
violence against these
women causes more deaths
and disabilities than cancer,
malaria, traffic accidents,
and war all taken together.
There is an incredibly
serious massive epidemic
of violence against woman
out there in the world.
To those who think that this seems like
a Don Quixote-like
campaign, I think that this
is an opportune time to
remind us all of the words
that I'm sure many of you
know of Margaret Mead,
"never doubt that a small group
"of thoughtful committed
citizens can change the world."
Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.
And I want to thank everyone
who has brought us here
together tonight, both our
guests who are pushing forward
this campaign, as well as those locally,
particularly Professor Harry Snyder
who is faculty at the
U of C Berkeley School
of Public Health, leading
an advocacy initiative
and he has a number of graduate students
that are working with
him on this initiative;
Zack Fernandez, Tatiana
Roberts, Lujane Alsaba,
and many other people are
always behind the scenes
in these efforts so, thank you to everyone
who I've left off.
So, without further ado, I will hand over
to Professor Laurie Dorfman,
also with the School of
Public Health that has taught
with us for many years,
who will emcee the rest of the program.
So, thank you.
- Thank you.
(audience applauding)
Thank you to the Dean,
thank you to the School of Public Health
for sponsoring this and
for being the launch site.
It's pretty exciting.
I'm really happy to be
here because of the topic.
And I have taught at the
School of Public Health
for some time, I also lead the
Berkeley Media Studies group,
which isn't affiliated with the university
but is a close friend.
And when we opened our doors in 1993,
we opened them with the
idea about making violence
a public health issue.
Was that possible?
Would people understand it?
And the answer is, yes but
we need more attention to it
and we need people to
understand the various aspects
of violence and we've been
studying it for a long time.
We've studied gun violence,
we've studied child sexual abuse,
we've studied sexual abuse,
generally among women,
we've studied intimate partner violence
and all these studies in the news,
all these studies are
of how the news covers
these issues and there
is a big piece left out
and that has to do with what
the public health aspect is
and what the context is.
And we're gonna learn
a lot about the context
for violence tonight and
it's really important to us
at BMSG, it's important us at
the School of Public Health,
and so I think this panel is
going to be just the start
of a conversation that's
gonna go on a long time
to get this job done.
So, we're really fortunate
tonight with the panelists
that we have.
So, I'm gonna tell you who we're
going to hear from tonight.
There's going to be be plenty of time
for discussion and questions.
We're going to hear just about
10 minutes from our panelists
and then we will have a
conversation among all of us
and then some treaty signing at the end.
So, we're going to
start with Lisa Shannon,
who is the co-founder
of Every Woman Treaty
and she is a human rights activist,
a women's rights activist,
a public health activist and a scholar.
She's gonna tell us how this started,
what's the genesis of this,
how did we all come to be in
this room together at once.
Then we're gonna hear from Pike Long.
Pike is at the St. James Infirmary.
She is an organizer, she
is organizing the people
who suffer most from violence
and from violence against
women and gendered violence
and so she's gonna tell
us what that means,
what that means locally.
And it's important to have
that local perspective
because, even though
this is a global issue, a global treaty,
something that we want
the U.N. to take up,
it happens in specific
places and specific times.
And it's that specificity
that we have to understand
and we have to hear from the people
who are experiencing it themselves
because they're gonna know
best what to do about it.
And then it's up to us to make
those connections globally.
And so, that's why next we're gonna hear
from Francisco Rivera,
who's going to give us,
he's on the steering committee
of Every Woman Treaty
and he's gonna give us a legal perspective
and not just a legal perspective
but an international perspective
and help us understand
how we blend public
health with human rights
and what that looks like
when it's braided together
because the solutions are gonna come from
a lot of different directions.
So, we have to understand
these different perspectives.
And then our last panelist
isn't quite here yet,
we will hear from Charlie Clements.
He is a renowned, the co-founder
also, of Every Woman Treaty
but with a history, who,
he'll be able to tell us
what the historical perspective of this is
and when we're faced with
such a daunting task,
as Every Woman Treaty
has set out for itself,
then it's important to know
where we have succeeded
in the past and we have
succeeded in the past,
and Charlie will tell
us a little bit about
what that means and how we can apply it.
So, that is it from me.
I'm going to elicit
your questions later on
but I'm going to turn it over to Shannon
who's gonna tell us how we got here,
what are we doing in this room together.
- Great, thank you.
Thank you, so, yeah it really
is such a treat to be here.
Someone said to me recently
that the journey of activism
is a journey upstream
and that has certainly been true for me.
Another person I ran into,
whose done a lot of fundraising
in the Women's Rights
movement, framed it this way,
she talked about giving 1.0
as being emergency response,
so typically that would
be people responding
to a tsunami or in the case
of violence against women
direct service crisis
lines that kind of thing,
2.0 in the women's rights space
being individual empowerment,
girls' education,
economic empowerment for women.
And that has been in
place where there's been
a tremendous amount of
focus over the last couple
of decades, actually, and
in particular, more and more
you hear about that.
The 3.0 is systems change,
and that's where there's been
very little focus, and
actually it's interesting
because my journey as an activist
has actually exactly followed that path.
My first job out of college
was working in women shelters
in Portland, Oregon, a
domestic violence shelter
for five years, answering the hotline,
spending almost every night
there on the night shift
for five years and then moved
out of that all together
for quite some time and
then ended up stumbling
into doing Work for Women in the Congo.
Specifically, fundraising to support women
through a group called Women
for Women International,
a woman-to-woman sponsorship program,
giving her education,
and economic empowerment,
and rebuilding her life following war,
what was considered in the
worst place on Earth for women
at that time.
And I went on to co-found
the first Sexual Violence Crisis Center
in Mogadishu, Somalia,
at a time that it was
an active war zone, partnering with
an incredible Somali woman activist there.
Again, trying to reach
women who had been forgotten
and that no one was paying attention to.
And we had tremendous success
for women, ultimately,
Run for Congo women raised
about 18 million dollars
supporting 90,000
Congolese women and kids.
In Somalia within six
months of opening the center
that we had started on, you
know, 30 women pledging $10
a month we were on the
cover of the New York Times,
broke the silence on rape in Mogadishu,
women's rights made it into
the new Somali Constitution.
Fartuun and Illwad, my
co-founders, were being quoted
in international press, they've
sort of become superstars.
Most importantly, a lot of
the women coming to the center
ended up going back out to communities
and becoming voices,
you know, in IDP camps,
internally displaced persons camps,
and became women's rights activists.
So, it's this tremendous success
and really not in that much time.
In 2013 I went back to Mogadishu though
and it's true, like a ton
had changed on the ground.
People were talking more openly,
there was all this momentum.
And then, the week that I went
back, the government arrested
a woman for talking to a
journalist about being gang raped
by government soldiers.
The evidence that they used to convict her
of false accusations
against the government
was something called a finger test.
I don't know how many of
you are familiar with this
and it's a bit of a trigger warning.
Basically, the evidence
was this mother of three,
who had birthed three children,
if a midwife could fit
more than two fingers in her,
she could not have possibly been raped.
That's the law in Somalia.
She was convicted on that
and what is interesting is
that week, in Mogadishu,
everyone knew about it.
At the center, I was at the center,
I mean, I co-founded the center
and no one would talk to me,
no one would talk to each other.
All those women's rights
activists who had been out there
in the camps, doing their thing,
all of a sudden wouldn't talk to anybody.
And what I realized is, in one
chilling government action,
a year-and-a-half of
progress had been wiped out.
Interestingly, the same week,
the new Somali president
was traveling around, meeting
with 27 foreign ministers,
courting aid for the new
Somalia, the progressive Somalia,
and fortunately this case
made the international press.
A petition was circulated,
700,000 people signed
the petition saying this
woman should be released.
Several foreign ministers
brought it up in the meetings
and they did end up releasing this woman,
which was great, it was very exciting.
But the thing that really chewed at me is,
what about all the women who don't get
700,000 signatures?
What about all the women who
don't have 27 foreign ministers
jumping to their aid?
And the truth is, with Somalia,
there was no line that
Somalia had crossed.
There was no standard that
foreign ministers could point to
and say, you know, you have
gone where Nations do not go.
They could say, tsk tsk, you
ought not behave that way
but there was no international standard.
And so three things
occurred to me at this time.
One, the advocates working
on the front lines, you know,
on fumes, I mean, we started
this program, like I said,
with about $300 a month in funding,
can change so much, like,
unbelievable progress.
And two, that that
progress can be wiped out
with one predatory government act.
And because of that,
there's a very real ceiling
on the progress that frontline
women's rights activists
can make without structural support,
without serious structural support.
Number three, that
governments, most of the time,
not all of the time but most of the time,
actually care what
other governments think.
So, it was through this
process that I realized
also, none of this is unique to Somalia.
That bad finger test is legal in Somalia,
in Jordan for instance,
domestic violence is illegal.
If there's a case of what
they call serious harm
but serious harm is defined
as a woman being hospitalized
more than nine days.
In the United States, I recently heard
about Georgetown student who was raped
and became pregnant, she
decided to keep the baby,
the rapist sued for parental rights
and now she has to see him every weekend
for the next 20 years.
In 31 U.S. states, in 31 U.S. states,
rapists maintain parental rights.
So, this violence is everywhere
and I found myself really
grappling with this idea.
I was like, the worst place
on Earth to be a woman, Congo?
Somalia?
Is it her own home?
Because this violence is everywhere.
It's one out of three women globally
who have just survived
domestic violence or rape,
this doesn't include
female genital mutilation,
a sexual harassment.
One out of three, and so, when
violence is this widespread,
it's everyone, it's our sisters,
it's our aunts, it's ourselves,
and I don't know if
any of you are like me,
some of the women in the
room never identified
as a survivor and yet I'm sitting through
the Kavanaugh hearings and I'm like,
oh wait a minute, I
got out of it that time
and I escaped it that time
and you think about all
the near misses and you
really start questioning
what survivor is even
when, if your female,
anywhere on Earth, you know
you've had multiple incidents
throughout your life where your
safety has been threatened.
So, but here's the thing, it's all of us
and yet we can stop it.
And we owe it to every human
being on Earth to address
this through systemic change.
And that's why we're working
on a treaty. (chuckles)
So why a treaty, you ask,
because treaties get governments
to make commitments they
would not otherwise make.
And in this case, commitments
for proven interventions.
I took some time out and
went to graduate school
a few years ago, right around that time
that I went to Mogadishu, when I met men
like Charlie Clements, who
will be here any minute,
I promise.
Learned about the Landmines Treaty,
later the Tobacco Treaty,
and hosted a convening
where we brought together
women's rights activists in 2013
and I met this amazing woman,
on my left, your right,
Vidya Sri, a survivor of
forced marriage herself,
and the day after our convening,
we decided we were
gonna launch a campaign.
That we were going to
spend the time that it took
to ask activists around the
world, not do we need a treaty,
because a treaty is just an agreement.
What would a treaty need
to look like in order
to actually be meaningful
to frontline advocates.
Being keenly aware, Vidya,
when we had coffee that day,
I remember her asking me over and over,
yeah, but what do you
want the treaty to be?
Like, what's it gotta be?
And I'm like, I don't, I'm
not the decider, I don't know.
Like, we need to ask the experts,
we need to ask the
people who are survivors,
who have lived through this,
there's a lot of nuance here,
let's engage in that process.
And so, that's where
we've been for the last
five and a half years is in a deep process
of asking thousands of frontline
women's rights activists
what does a treaty need to look like
in order to be meaningful
and to mean real safety
for women and girls.
And so, we have arrived
at pretty basic approach
which combines the best of
Public Health and Human Rights.
We want it to be hosted by
the World Health Organization
and we want it to do
some pretty basic things,
employing evidence-based
interventions to end the violence.
And so, we call it the
whole hand framework,
as a simple way to remember it.
These are the interventions
that pretty much
all experts agree work.
So, if you think of
comprehensive national reform,
then these are the prongs of that reform.
One, clean up the laws.
No more finger test, no more
arrests for false accusations.
Number two, well, I will say quickly,
in places where there's just
a law on domestic violence,
just a law, we're not talking
about how well it's written,
how well it's implemented,
33% lower mortality rate
for adult women and they've
even controlled for income
and education level and it still holds.
So highly significant,
law does save lives.
Secondly, better if
people know about the law.
So, police, judges, but
also doctors and nurses
because often the first
people coming into contact
with survivors and then
services, of course, services.
You have to provide that
frontline support so women
can get away if they need
to and rebuild their lives.
And lastly, prevention education.
That was one of the
biggest surprises to me
and listening to frontline
advocates, that you know,
I came in that first
convening, I titled everything,
criminalizing violence against
women and they were like, no.
That is not the way to go.
Prevention education, if nothing
else, prevention education
because that's where you
get real culture change.
And so it really shifted our focus.
So, this, you can only
get done if you fund it.
But it turns out that treaties
can catalyze exponential
increases in cash.
So, for instance with
the Landmines Treaty,
within 36 hours of introducing
it, 500 million dollars
in commitments.
And that was not just for the first year.
The budget has continued
to be 400 to 500 million
per year since 1997.
I will mention, just this one little bit,
and then I'm gonna stop talking
because I just heard it last
week and I was fascinated.
What do you think the total
global spend is every year
on just women's rights?
45 billion dollars.
45 billion dollars a
year but those are all of
the programs that include women's rights
as a secondary outcome.
For the programs that
are exclusively focused
on women's rights, it's only 4% of that.
Which is less than two billion dollars
and of that only 2% of it
goes to frontline women's rights activists
who doing the best of this work.
We want our fund to be a four
billion dollar a year fund.
Just one violence against women and girls,
most of which will go to frontline
women's rights activists.
So, I'm gonna stop talking
but that's the primer
on what we're working on.
Thank you. (laughs)
(audience applauding)
- Thank you.
Go ahead and have a seat.
Pike, you want to stay, you
want to go to the podium,
what do you wanna do?
- Well, I was gonna just
sit but I guess I can go--
- You can sit.
You're fine there.
- Okay, well, hi.
I'll just sit, I'll just sit, why not.
I don't know if my mic is,
oh, there it goes, okay.
Hi, thanks.
Okay, so, hi.
I am Pike Long, I'm Deputy
Director of St. James Infirmary.
We are located in San Francisco
and if you haven't heard of
us, we are the nation's first
and only occupational
health and safety clinic
that is run for and by
people in the sex trades.
We've been around since 1999,
so we're about to celebrate
our 20th anniversary and you know,
we exist to provide
services, direct services,
to the exact kind of folks that are
most at the intersections,
most at the margins
and at highest risk of violence.
I'll tell you a little bit
more about my background too,
just before I dive into what
we're doing at St. James,
but prior to my work with St. James,
I actually recently graduated from
this very Berkeley School of Public Health
where I got the study with
Harry, which is fabulous.
Thank you.
And I think that, you can
correct me if I'm wrong,
one of the reasons he thought
I might be a good fit,
is because some of the
other work I've done
is I've done a lot of work with folks
who are incarcerated,
particularly trans women
and gender non-conforming folks,
and prior to that with cisgender women
in the San Francisco County jails,
and prior to that I did
lots of health education
with young people, especially
folks who they called
street involved, so either
homeless, marginally housed,
or otherwise involved in street economies.
Lots of those young people
were also incarcerated.
So, I've been working
for quite a long time
in the Bay Area with folks that almost
all have seen tremendous
amounts of violence
that they didn't really
have the choice to escape.
And so it's really deeply important to me
that we that we managed to tie together,
like you're saying, like the
local issues on the ground
and what this actually looks
like on a day-to-day basis
for human beings, individuals,
and then how does that get
all the way up to this massive
international treaty, which
sounds so giant and obscure
in some ways.
So, thanks for inviting me. (laughs)
So we already know that the
women who face other forms
of structural discrimination
are at the highest risk
of violence.
So, who are these women?
Poor and unhoused women,
are, if you look around
the streets of San Francisco,
and ask any single woman
who's out there, or gender
non-conforming person,
might I add, they are at
massive risk of assault
just for existing, just for
being outside, just for living.
Transgender women, can't
even walk down the street
or get on a bus without fear
of assault if they get clocked.
I can't tell you how many
trans women I have in my life
who live in perpetual fear
of violence, simply again,
for existing as who they are.
Sex workers, needless to say,
I work at a sex worker clinic.
Sex workers are at massively
disproportionate risk
of violence, not just from clients,
but from random passersby
who assume them to be working
at the time, from police, unfortunately,
about a quarter of assaults
reported by sex workers
are assaults at the hands of police.
So, something to really work on.
Migrant laborers, when we think
about the levels of assault,
sexual and physical, amongst
women who are undocumented
and who are doing work
in fields, and kitchens,
and nail salons and the
levels of exploitation
that they face, that's absolutely somebody
that we also see actually in the clinic.
Women who are addicted to substances
and struggle with that
are extremely vulnerable.
And finally women who face mental illness
and this is just off the top of my head
and some notes I took but
yeah women who struggle
with mental illness, they're
also incredibly vulnerable.
And why is this a vulnerability
and it's because I think
in our society these are women and people
who are considered largely disposable.
They are not necessarily considered
to be contributing members of society
and I'll tell you, as
somebody who's worked closely
with folks in all of these categories,
for quite a long time that's,
nothing could be further from the truth.
Like, actually, in my experience,
most of the most intelligent, brilliant,
thoughtful, compassionate,
radical people fall in
to at least one of these categories.
And they're not disposable and
we need to actually stand up
and actually make sure
that they are counted
and protected against violence as well.
I want to go a little bit into sex workers
because that is our area of
expertise at St. James Infirmary
and just talk a little bit
about some of the struggles
that sex workers in particular face.
And I'm going to tell you,
we very strongly believe
at St. James Infirmary, that
the source of most violence
against sex workers isn't
actually anything inherent
about, you know, bad
clients or bad people,
it's the stigma that sex
workers live with day-to-day,
makes violence permissible,
it makes it so that
a dead hooker joke is
still an acceptable thing
for people to make.
Whereas we've made so many
strides in so many other places.
It means that, yeah, again
like, we're the butt of jokes
in movies, you know, it's
just an ongoing onslaught
of aggression that I think
really lends to this sense
of yeah, permissiveness to just like,
oh they're throw away people,
they're not even people.
Dehumanization.
And of course, sex workers
aren't gonna be safe going
to the police if they are assaulted.
I mean, again, even as a
highly privileged person,
I don't feel safe going to the police.
The police have not been my friend,
not even as a sex worker,
as an activist, (laughs)
you know, I've been brutalized
by the police numerous times
just for being at a protest.
So, how safe do we feel?
And I'm not here to bash the cops
but really like, we need better frameworks
and we need better solutions.
And I'm really glad that you brought up,
'cause one of the things,
when I was reading the treaty
that really came up, I was like, well,
this is a cercarial approach.
The very first thing is
criminalize and punish
and I'm like yeah, in some extreme cases,
that is the thing, right?
But I'm so glad that you brought it back
to what we really, really
need is to see change.
We need education, we need
stuff that really focuses
on humanizing one another,
teaching not just men and boys,
but all of us but
particularly men and boys,
how to treat women and girls
and gender-nonconforming folks
with the respect, love and
care that they deserve.
And so some of the stuff
that we're doing here
at St. James, though,
'cause we do take a really
anti, you know, we don't
really believe that
the prison industrial complex
is ever gonna solve the problems.
We think it's a continuation of the racist
and genocidal beginnings of our nation.
I'm not gonna get on my
soapbox but we don't really
think that's the solution, right?
It can, again, it's
like a dire last resort,
as far as we're concerned.
So we've tried to combat that
with community-based programming.
We do tons of training, we do outreach,
we do offer to our immediate community,
we offer clinical services, we
offer mental health support,
and we do, we're always trying.
In fact, one of my board
members is here right now
and so we're constantly
trying to figure out
how do we improve, how do we build,
where are the gaps still
existing and how do we improve?
And make sure that our agency
is as relevant as possible
to the immediate needs.
This has been a brutal year
for people in the sex trades.
I don't know how much anyone
has been paying attention
who isn't directly impacted
but who here has kind of Fosta-Sesta?
Okay, I see like three hands.
I'm just going to really quickly say,
last April, almost a year
ago, Congress passed a law
and Donald Trump gladly signed
it and that made it illegal
for anyone to, well basically it made it
so the websites could be held liable
for any content that promoted
or facilitated prostitution
on the internet.
This was a huge deal because
actually for many years,
sex workers had started moving away
from street-based sex work,
which we know is much, much riskier
and you need a very specialized
skill set to navigate
that safely, a skill set
that most of us just frankly
will never have.
So, sex workers started coming indoors
because they could
safely advertise and vet
for clients online, right?
This was touted as an
anti-trafficking measure
and it was really celebrated
by all these people
who were, yay, now that the
internet isn't gonna be a place
where you can find you know a
potential trafficking victim,
all trafficking will end.
Well guess what, that
didn't happen. (chuckles)
In fact, actual
trafficking has been pushed
much further underground,
sex workers who were adult
consenting sex workers
and doing this for economic necessity
or just because they wanted
to have that kind of freedom
and flexibility in their lives
were suddenly shut out of a job overnight
resulting in serious financial crisis
for many people who are
supporting families,
supporting themselves, putting
themselves through school.
It also meant that a
lot of people got forced
to either go back out to the street,
where they had many of them
had never worked outside before
and didn't understand how to
navigate that successfully,
and it also forced, you know,
and that it's just made it
a lot harder for the girls
who are already working
on the street.
So, I know my time is coming to an end,
so one of the things that
we've been really working on
at St. James is working on not just an end
of Fosta and Sesta but really
decriminalizing sex work
so that actually, it can position
people in the sex trades,
to root out trafficking because
those of us who are all up
on there are the ones who
can identify it the fastest.
And actually have been the
biggest allies to law enforcement
in locating and rescuing
those people (chuckles)
or assisting I would prefer to say.
I don't like the word rescue at all.
And we're about to offer
self defense classes
at St. James for sex workers.
So if you'd like to learn more,
please go to our website.
We always take donations and
we are looking for sponsors
for our Gala.
That's my pitch. (laughs)
I have more to say but I will end it now.
- Good job.
- Thanks.
(audience applauding)
- [Laurie] Okay, thank
you, that was great.
And we're gonna have time for questions
and things like that, so don't worry.
So, Francisco, do you want to stay,
you wanna go to the podium, how--
- I'll stay right here, sit with you.
- [Laurie] Okay, that's just fine.
- Thank you for that, and always take
the opportunity to fundraise.
(laughing)
Especially with them of all things.
So, hello everybody, my
name is Francisco Rivera.
I'm a human rights
attorney from Puerto Rico
and I'm currently teaching
law and some classes
at a law school down in South Bay.
I run an international human rights clinic
where students get to not only learn
about international human rights law
but actually practice it by representing
human rights victim, survivors
and doing policy advocacy
and litigation work in various
international law fields.
One of which in particular,
is violence against women.
In my prior life, I used to
work as a senior attorney
at the Inter-American
Court of Human Rights
and later on I'll talk a
little bit about the law
about violence against women
in the Inter-American system
and as a result of that
work that I was doing before
I got contacted by Vidya,
who was in the prior slide,
one of the co-founders,
and they asked the students
in my clinic, hey can you do
a study on the effectiveness
of international law as they relate
to violence against women?
Are there any gaps in
international law that we need
to address, that may be a
treaty could actually help with?
And we said yes, that
was, I think, in 2013-14,
when you were starting at
Harvard-Kennedy School of
Government, our center.
And we guess, well, we did
identify there were some gaps
in international law
that are addressed today.
Then I like to emphasize on implementation
and how this treaty is going
to be actually monitored,
right, you know, when you
have a violation, then what?
And so they asked me to
chair a committee to,
with a wonderful people
from all over the world,
I want to emphasize this
is a worldwide movement
where you have input from
survivors you mentioned
but also academics and workers, attorneys,
for all those public health professionals,
everything and we analyzed that issue
and then said well, now we
have to draft draft the treaty.
So, I got the task of actually
drafting some of the language
in the treaty about
implementation and I said,
why don't you come into
the steering committee
and that means that I get to speak
with beautiful people like you.
And I'm down the road, so that's good.
So, that's my connection
to Every Woman Treaty
but I wanna take the
opportunity to just step back
a little bit and know your audience.
Public Speaking 101, know your audience.
So, usually I speak to either
law students or lawyers
but that's not the case here.
So, I guess it's my role
to sort of step back
and saying what's a treaty, right?
And we keep hearing this word treaty
and I'm sure you've heard
about signing a treaty
and ratifying a treaty
but what does that really mean, right?
So, let me just step back a little bit
and provide some of that context, right?
So, treaties for nothing
else, than just sources
of legal obligation.
Just like any other law.
You've got federal statutes,
you've got local statutes.
Well, a treaty is another source of law
that is just an
international source of law
and you have treaties
at the United Nations,
you have treaties at different
regional organizations.
Can you think of the European
Union, the African Union,
the organization for American States.
So, that's the equivalent
to our state laws.
So we have both international,
we have regional,
we have federal law, we have local law,
different types of law.
All of those are simply
sources of legal obligations.
So, a treaty is a particular
type of international source
of legal obligation and there are several
United Nations treaties on human rights.
There's actually nine main treaties.
None of them addresses
specifically the issue
of the violence against women.
So, we have one, anybody
know what CEDAW stands for?
CEDAW.
- [Woman] The elimination
of violence against women.
- Thank you for saying
that because that is what
it should be but it's not.
It's a Convention on the Elimination of
Discrimination Against Women.
Now if you look at CEDAW, use CONTROL+F
and put some search terms
and you try to find sexual
assault, it's not there.
You try to find rape, it's not there.
Domestic violence is not there.
There are some forms of
violence, human trafficking
but I think, it's in there
but there's no specific content
in that United Nations
treaty on women's rights
that addresses specifically the issue
of violence against women and girls.
One way that the United Nations
has gotten around that issue
is there's this body, international body,
that's in charge of interpreting CEDAW,
providing a better understanding
what the text of CEDAW means.
And that body of experts has
actually issued two things
called general comments.
One in the 80's and one, actually,
last year or two years
ago, explaining that,
oh when we talk about discrimination,
we also meant to say
violence against women
and that's great, actually in
the content of those comments
are fantastic but they're
comments, they're not treaties.
So, the binding nature of those comments,
we call that soft law, for a reason.
You know, it's questionable.
So, based, and playing
the Devil's Advocate,
some people say we don't need a new treaty
because we have that, we have CEDAW,
and we have international experts
who have interpreted CEDAW
to mean that it also applies
in the context of violence against women.
So we're saying that's
just simply not enough
because of the gravity of the situation,
we need something much
more specific and voila.
You wanna sit over here?
- Charlie, you can come join.
- Please.
- [Charlie] Hello, I'm Charlie, hello.
- This is our final
panelist, Charles Clements.
Founder.
Anyway, so, if you look at CEDAW
it doesn't say anything
about violence against women
and we think that it's important
to have a specific treaty
on violence against women.
And guess what, we have
examples of regional treaties
that have been successful
and we can look through those
as an example of why this actually works.
So, let me walk you through those, right?
Welcome and very nice to meet you.
So, and just to put it in
terms of chronological order,
CEDAW actually came into
effect in 1981, right?
So until 1995, it was the
only real international treaty
on woman's rights.
By 1995, the America's
got together and decided,
wait a minute, we want
to do our own treaty
and we do want it to address
violence against women
because guess what, we learn from mistakes
and we build from previous experience.
So, that's what the America's did
and they passed something called
the Belem do Para Convention.
The name comes from the city
in Brazil where it was adopted
but the official name bear with me,
the Inter-American Convention
on the Prevention,
Punishment and Eradication
of Violence Against Women.
I think Every Woman Treaty is much better.
(laughing)
So, that particular treaty
provides this legal framework
that's specifically focused a whole treaty
on violence against women, right?
And it proved to be successful.
For example, in Brazil, after ratifying
the Belem do Para Convention,
Brazil actually might
have made many, many
things, most of which are in
that hand approach that
Shannon was mentioning before.
I can highlight for example
that they established
specialized domestic violence courts,
they created several prevention
and treatment centers,
and to bring mechanisms for survivors
that didn't exist were it not
having ratified this treaty
and I should add, having
a government that actually
wanted to implement this
treaty, political will is key
in implementation.
In Mexico, similarly, they
relied on the normative framework
that developed in the
Inter-American system
to actually modify their
laws, they modified
the Constitution even
and the further developed
their domestic laws to
make sure, you know,
that you not only address the
from a punitive respective,
which I think we all agree
in the human rights world,
you know, that's a piece of the puzzle
but can never be the whole puzzle, right?
And they made a lot of
changes that have proven
to actually work.
So, as a result of that
other regions in the world
looked at the Americans and
saying, oh we should do that.
And so, from 1980, 1995,
which is when Belem do Para
was entered into force,
we have, 10 years later,
ironically, like almost every 10 years,
we have a new treaty, original treaty.
So, 10 years later, in the African region,
they pass the Maputo Protocol
which is also in the same thing.
It's actually the protocol
of the African Charter
on Human and Peoples Rights
and its on the rights of women in Africa.
So, that Maputo Protocol,
protocol is another fancy name
for a treaty, it's just a
baby treaty that is attached
to a larger treaty but it's still binding
and it's not a comment.
So, Africa was doing
that and I will mention
that the definition of
violence that they added in
the Maputo Protocol is much
better than what we have
in both CEDAW and the Belem do
Para because it actually adds
economic violence to the definition
of violence against women.
So, we keep learning, we keep developing,
and we keep improving, and then in 2014,
so almost 10 years after
the Maputo Protocol,
we have the European Union actually pass
the Istanbul Convention.
And that's the latest
fantastic development
that we have on the issue
of violence against women
and they took implementation
to the next level.
They actually created a very,
very out of the box thinking
on how we can actually
implement this treaty.
So, that's the legal framework
that we have right now.
No United Nations treaty
alliance against women,
a couple of regional treaties,
that if you were paying
attention to the regions,
simply does not cover the whole world.
So, we have a bunch of
regions that are not covered
by these regional treaties.
That's one of the reasons
why we're advocating
for a U.N. treaty that
would cover the whole world
instead of leaving it
to-- it's kind of like,
federal law versus state law.
You want to have a federal law
further than just a state law
for every state.
So it's the equivalent, right?
So guess what?
The U.S. has not ratified any of those.
(laughing)
We have ratified of the United Nations
human rights treaties, three of them,
that at least tangentially
cover women's rights,
one is the International Covenant on Civil
and Political Rights, the other one is
the Convention Against
Torture, and the third one is
the Convention on the Elimination
of Racial Discrimination
and there's two protocols to
the Convention on the Rights of the Child,
which we are the only
country in the world that has
not ratified, that do address some issues
of violence for girls, at least.
So the idea here is to create
this United Nations treaty-- is really?
My time is really over?
Okay.
(laughing)
It's to create this United Nations treaty
that will take the lessons learned,
the collective lessons learned,
from what we know from more
than 30 years of practice
and I want to emphasize that this process
is the product as I mentioned,
not of just of great leadership,
which we do have you can see
but this is how many calls did we have--
- [Lisa] Thousands.
- At four in the morning
here in California--
- [Lisa] Thousands.
And then Uganda, it's 11
at night and then Russia
and we're all in a Skype
or Zoom call together
trying to really collectively think,
is this the best we could do?
And just don't trust us,
trust the thousands of people
that have worked in this process saying,
yes this is the best we can do right now.
I'll be happy to answer
questions about treaty process
and about treaty content
as well, thank you.
- [Laurie] Francisco, thank you.
- [Lisa] Thank you.
(audience applauding)
- So, Charlie, welcome to the panel.
I'm Laurie, it's really nice to meet you.
- Hi Laurie, very nice to meet you.
- Let me tell you what's happened
and then I'll invite you to join in.
Lisa started by telling us why
we're in this room together,
what the Genesis was, why we
need this, what it's about.
Pike followed her and talked about
what it meant from the local level,
what it means for the women
who are really getting harmed
and why they have to be at
the front of our thinking
and the front of this conversation.
And then Francisco talked
about the legal perspective
and what I'm hoping you'll
help us all understand
is how something like
this is even possible.
Can we really succeed?
Does history give us any
lessons for going forward
and having faith that we
can make this come to pass?
- Terrific, well, thank you.
Let me, is my mic on?
Is that okay?
I apologize for being late.
I'm on a very small faculty
about 30 miles north of here
and today was one of
our six admissions days
and all eight faculty have to participate.
So, I'm sorry I couldn't get away
but thank you and I
thank you all for coming.
You know, in just a few
minutes I need to convince you
why a treaty like this can happen
and why we can have a
treaty addressing these gaps
and law that leave women and girls
so vulnerable to violence.
And I'm gonna refer to two
presidents that Francisco
might have referred to, that
will help give us confidence
about that.
And the first is a Landmine Treaty,
which was promulgated
1997 and entered force
as international law.
So, when a treaty is promulgated,
the nations step up and sign
in and by signing they say,
we're going to take this
back to our Parliament
and they're gonna ratify it.
And when enough nations have ratified it,
it becomes, it enters force,
it becomes international law.
So the Landmines Treaty
entered force faster
than any treaty in history prior to that
in just two years, and it did four things.
It banned the use,
production, and transfer
of anti-personnel mines.
It called for the destruction
of all stock piles of mines.
It focused attention on
resources for the victims
of landmines,
and it mandated mines education,
as well as, mines clearance
in countries that were plagued with them.
This was not an Arms Control
agreement led by government,
it was led by NGOs.
It was led by NGOs who were seeing
that the numbers of injuries
were climbing steadily
and their ability to provide prostheses
to the victims was climbing
at this kind of rate
and they said, if they
could ban dum dum bullets
after World War I, the
bullets that exploded
when they hit you, why can't
we ban this horrendous weapon?
And we started that campaign in 1989.
There were six NGO's
that started the effort
and by 1997 we had an international treaty
and as a result of that,
won the Nobel Prize,
not for a lifetime of work
but because we had created
a new path diplomacy,
one led by civilians, not by governments,
not by the military.
So, Russia and the US and
China did not sign that treaty,
did not ratify it, it didn't surprise us,
they were at the table
trying to water it down
all along the way.
But there's a very famous,
if you're a lawyer, a very
famous lawyer at Columbia,
named Lewis Hinken,
who sometimes is called
the father of international
law and Lewis Hinken
used to say, most Nations
obey most international law,
most of the time.
And he was making the
point that even though
there's no police to
enforce international law,
the fact is, countries
don't like to be outliers.
They don't like to be
the state department,
in terms of it this way,
they don't like to be
outside the community
of civilized Nations which
we accuse countries of
that we don't agree with often.
(laughing)
But, in other words,
Russia, China, and the US
refused to sign a treaty
but they felt guilty
about not signing it,
so each of those nations
the next year passed a law forbidding
the export of landmines.
They were the largest
manufacturers in the world
and each of them said, well,
you know we're not gonna give
them up, our army loves them too much,
but we're not going to allow
anyone else to use the mines
that we manufacture.
So, it was a great
victory for the campaign,
even though those countries didn't sign it
and we weren't really expecting them to.
So, when you hear about
the the letters ICBL,
it stands for the International
Campaign to Ban Landmines.
It succeeded in establishing that treaty,
a coalition of NGO's and
winning the 1997 Nobel Prize.
And now I said I was
gonna refer to two things.
The other one is called the FCTC.
The Framework Convention
on Tobacco Control.
Not as bad as Belem in terms
of title but kind of clumsy
because it's called The
Tobacco Treaty for short.
But you felt the impact of that already
although you might not
know anything about it.
Promulgated in 2003 by the
World Health Organization,
it was the first Public
Health Treaty in the world.
And it required governments
to do several things.
One, impose restrictions
on tobacco advertising,
sponsorship and promotion to minors.
You know, when we used
to have Music Festivals
in San Francisco, they used to hand out
free cigarettes, little
packages of 5 or 10 cigarettes
to kids trying to hook them.
They can't do that anymore.
They have to have new
packaging and warnings
on tobacco products,
with a skull crossbones,
saying this is dangerous for your health.
They have to establish
clean indoor air controls
and not having smoking
sections of restaurants,
or smoking sections of bars,
or smoking sections on aircraft
as you may remember not so long ago.
So it's recently celebrated
it's 15th anniversary
and it's had a remarkable impact.
None more important though,
than defeating the
multiple lawsuits brought
by big tobacco claiming
countries have no legal authority
to regulate these things.
And so there have been
three hundred such lawsuits
by tobacco companies and tobacco interests
challenging a country's
ability to do this.
And, knowing the litigious
nature of the tobacco industry,
many countries were hesitant
to impose these controls
before the treaty 'cause they
knew they would be tied up
in a terribly expensive lawsuit
that could drag on for years
and cost them millions of dollars.
So, and let me give you an example.
There was a strong opposition
to control measures
in Uruguay and in Australia
because they were sued
because the packaging
and label of tobacco products
really made the manufacturers angry.
In Kenya a case of British
American Tobacco versus
a cabinet Secretary of
Health, for example,
the court of appeal of
Kenya considered a challenge
to the Tobacco Control
regulations a suite of measures
and tobacco companies claimed
that the Kenyan government
didn't have the authority to do this
and in this victory and
in the victory in Uruguay
and the victory in Australia,
and I'm not going to go
through the other 299 or 300,
what was cited in the
judgment of the course
was the FCTC.
They said, this establishes
the authority of the state
to do this by its very nature.
So Philip Morris Norway
versus Healthcare Services
of Norway, that also
Austell District found
that it accepted in the court,
a battle, knowledge of the
tobacco advertising promotion
of sponsorship led to
increased consumption
of tobacco products.
They said, that's just a given fact,
and in fact, Norway was able
to implement the controls
that it wanted to.
So, as I said, 331 different lawsuits
and, in about 80% of them
where there were victories,
and most of them were
victories, they're victories
because they cited this
treaty as the authority
for countries to do this.
So, tobacco companies
estimate that tobacco products
cause about a trillion dollars
annually in medical expenses
and loss productivity.
Let's compare that.
Lisa probably mentioned to you earlier,
that the World Bank estimates
that violence against women
cost us globally about 5.3%
of the global economy or
four trillion dollars.
So, violence against women
is costing us four times
of what tobacco losses amount to
and, if we could do it for tobacco,
we should be able to do it
for violence against women.
Landmines were estimated in 1997
when we implemented the treaty, sorry,
when we promulgated the treaty,
to kill or wound 25
thousand people annually.
Violence wounds still kills
2.5 million women a year.
In other words, a thousand
times as many women are killed
or wounded by violence
than were killed by
tobacco and, I'm sorry,
killed by landmines in a year.
So, this problem is a
thousand times more serious
than the issue that
mobilized our Coalition.
So, think about it.
If you're my age, you probably remember
a time when there no seat belts.
And how did that change?
It changed when someone passed
a law mandating seat belts.
And some states didn't go along with it.
Montana said, no we don't want seat belts.
And they said, fine, you
can lose your highway money
and you can do without seat belts,
but eventually they all came along.
This is how things change.
Think about when I was growing up,
people threw hamburger wrappers
and cups out their windows
of the cars all the time--
- [Francisco] Still do.
- How did it change?
(laughing)
It changed because Lady
Bird Johnson introduced
the Beautification of Highways Act
and made it illegal to
liter on the highways.
So, laws are the beginning of
how cultural change happens.
As Rasheeda Maju, the special rapajuer
for violence against women said,
how can we hold perpetrators
of violence against women
accountable if there's
no protections in law
because of these gaps in law that exist
all of the world?
So, in concluding, I just
want to repeat something
that Will might have mentioned earlier
but, to create the context
for this for this discussion,
WHOS estimates that for women
between 15 and 44 years old,
violence, that is interpersonal violence,
causes more death and disabilities
than cancer, malaria, traffic accidents
and war taking the other.
So, around the world,
more women are killed,
and 70% of that violence against women
is directed by intimate partners.
So, thank you.
- Charlie, thank you so much.
(audience applauding)
Fantastic panel.
I want to ask Tatyana to come up here
just to be up here with the panel
but while we do that, 'cause
we want to tell you about
the treaty and the signing.
Are there any questions?
We have just a few minutes left.
But come on up here,
and while you do that,
let's see if there is anybody
who wants to raise a question?
- Right there.
- Oh, yes.
Please tell us who you
are and ask your question.
I don't know if we have, we do have a mic.
- [Martha] It's okay.
- Well, we'll need to
hear you on, you know,
it's being recorded, so.
So tell us your name, and
what your question is.
- My name is Martha O'Stryke.
Can you hear me?
- Yes.
- Yes.
- I'm with Global Fund for Women.
And I'd say 10 or 12 of
our folks were at CSW.
- Yeah.
- What was that, last
week or the week before?
- Last week.
- And so, I'm curious, it sounds
like the treaty is written.
- No.
- Oh, it's not written.
- No, so what we have here is
the peoples call to nations.
This is a very short one page, sort of
whole-hand framework.
The treaty, we have gone
through a global consultation,
we're about four years in at this point,
which began with asking
60 front line activists
from the working group
12 open-ended questions.
Then we took that, coded it,
split out into 25 special committees
on a number of topics,
from definition of violence
to the LGBTQI, to women with disabilities,
to indigenous women,
and those groups all came
together with recommendations.
So, Fran shared the
implementation committee.
we came up with recommendations there
that then went to a group of
attorneys from around the world
who have come up with a 35-page
document of recommendations.
But where we are right now is taking that
and putting it back out to
whoever wants to input on it
to get feedback on what have we missed,
what's off here, in the same
way that I made that mistake
with calling everything
criminalization the first year.
There are gonna be things,
contexts we don't get, more
harm than good on some things,
so we want as much feedback
from front line activists
and experts.
And this time beyond just
front line activists.
We want to be talking with faith leaders,
we want to talk with people from...
I mean, we are from every
region at this point,
but the point is, delighted to meet you
and would love to get your feedback
on the contents of the treaty. (chuckles)
Again, Global Fund for Women,
we'd love to have Global
Fund for Women take a look
and give us input, let
us know what you think.
We weight all of that very heavily,
particularly if the people
inputting are survivors
or directly serving survivors
with special attention
to marginalized groups.
But a treaty is only drafted
when lead nations write the treaty.
And so, the process we're in right now
is identifying 10 to 20
potential lead Nations,
and we're vetting them
for whether or not the contents
that the front line women's
rights activists have written
resonates for them and they're
willing to stick to it.
And then, those are the nations
we're going to pair up with
and charge forward.
that's what the Landmines treaty did.
The Landmines treaty, you
know, half the US was like,
yeah, we'll sign the
treaty, we're all over it.
But they wanted it to have no teeth.
So it was Canada that
found seven other nations
that were terms coronations
that would stick to it,
who said, come back this time last year.
Charlie, you were there.
Come back this time next year,
we're going to write this thing.
and those six, seven nations came together
and they wrote the most
rigorous version of that treaty
they possibly could.
So we're identifying that,
but we don't expect the actual treaty...
It's a three-year process
with governments writing the treaty,
and REM right now is engaging experts
we consider first and foremost survivors
and front line practitioners experts,
but beyond that, certainly
international NGOs
that are doing that work,
as well as any stakeholders in the space.
Because there are little things.
Like, for instance, in the
in certain Muslim communities
you can't you can't
talk about contraception
but you can talk about child spacing.
Simple change in words
has exactly the same meaning
in practical application,
but if you just ask the question upfront,
you end up in a really different place.
So, that's that's why
the global consultation.
- [Laurie] Thank you.
We only have a couple of minutes left
for our formal program.
I see several hands up,
so I'm going to emplore the
panelists to stick around
and so, please come from
and ask your questions.
And we want to use our
last few minutes, Tatiana,
to talk about the signing.
(speaking faintly)
Absolutely, come on up.
- So, hi everyone.
My name is Tatiana Roberts,
and I'm a first year MPH candidate
at the School of Public Health,
and I'm also a member of
the Advocacy Initiative.
So the Advocacy Initiative
is a collective of students,
faculty, and practitioners in the field
that learn and strategize together
on how to be effective change agents
and push for policy change.
I ask you all to join us in our efforts
and become change Leaders with us.
So tonight, as our
panelists have touched on,
we've learned about the
pervasive human rights issue
that is violence against women
on the both of global and local scale,
and we've also identified
a proposed solution
and evaluated its potential.
I want to remind you all
of the importance in
critical role of advocacy
in advancing systems and policy change.
We each have a role here today
to push his agenda forward
and put a stop to this violence.
So how do we do this?
My ask of you all, as
Lisa already touched on,
is to sign the People's Call to Nations.
I actually signed this treaty,
signed this part portion the
treaty, back in late January
because of my commitment
to advancing women's health
and rights, women's rights.
I also had signed this treaty
because I actually wanted to put my words
and my commitment into action,
and I thought this was a
really important tool to do so.
So I ask you all to take a few moments.
Some of you may find
that you have a white packet
in front of you, or if not,
we also have a app.
There's an Every Woman Treaty app
that you, if you have an iPhone,
you can find that the app store,
or if you have an Android, on Google play.
Again, all you have to
do to search for the app
is just putting Every Woman Treaty,
and I ask that you sign this document,
take a moment to sign this document,
and also to list down
your reasons for signing.
So, while everyone just
taking a moment to read,
I'll actually read be
reading the treaty out loud.
- [Pike] And if we may ask--
- Oh, and if we may ask too,
that once you've taken a
moment to kind of process
and sign the treaty
that you stand up in solidarity with us,
and in community with us.
Okay, so the People's Call to Nations.
I stand for a life free
from all forms of violence
for every woman and girl everywhere.
I hereby join the call for global treaty
to eradicate violence
against women and girls.
Article One.
All national parties
shall enact or enhance
comprehensive national reform.
One.
Reform laws to eradicate
violence against women and girls.
Two.
Implement interventions
through health, justice,
and security professionals
who serve survivors, such as judges,
police, doctors, and nurses.
Three.
Provide services to survivors of violence.
Four.
Enact prevention education campaigns
based on rigorous
evidence of effectiveness.
Article Two.
Establish a global implementation fund
to finance interventions
specified an Article One
through governments and or international
and local nongovernmental organizations.
I hereby urge nations to
adopt a treaty mandating that
governments and citizens alike
undertake the work required
to end this pandemic of violence
against women and girls.
- Tatiana, thank you very much.
Thank you to the panelist,
and please come up and ask your
questions as you have them.
And the room looks
fabulous with everybody's--
- Thank you so much.
- Thank you, guys.
(applause)
- Rosalind, if you track
down Rosalind here,
she'll be able to take your
portrait and your signature,
and we will email you
your version of this.
Or, if you download the app,
you can take your picture and sign it
and you'll get one of these
that gives your reason and your signature
that will only go to you.
You can share it on social media.
- [Laurie] Thank you, everybody.
- [Pike] Thank you.
- [Laurie] Thank you to the
School of Public Health.
