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A gender perspective on international humanitarian law
INTERNATIONAL
A gender perspective on international humanitarian law
– Catherine A. MacKinnon
One purpose of international humanitarian law (IHL) is to minimise suffering during armed conflict. A developing field within IHL is the mainstreaming of a gender perspective in armed conflict. A gender perspective acknowledges that women, girls, men, and boys are affected by armed conflict in different ways. Therefore, organisations can meet their legal obligations more effectively by responding to these different experiences. This article will introduce the key themes of this discipline.
Firstly, an overarching principle of IHL is to distinguish civilians from members of armed forces or of organised armed groups (Distinction). The purpose of Distinction is to ensure that only military objectives are subject to attack (while civilian objects are protected from attack). When planning an attack, military planners are obliged to minimise civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure as far as possible (Proportionality). An understanding of the different life experiences of women, girls, men and boys helps planners to understand the unintended effects of military action in order to minimise impact on civilians. This perspective encourages military planners to focus on human security, as well as on combat.
To give some examples of gender advice: (1) Monrovia, Liberia, 2004: patrol teams asking locals for their views on a proposal to return former child soldiers to their families revealed that families were often unwilling to take their sons back after the atrocities they had committed. This research showed that the stereotype of mothers taking back their children no matter what turned out not to be true, and forced the UN mission to rethink their plans; (2) Bosnia & Herzegovina, 2006: weapons amnesties had always been targeted at men. A campaign to target women and emphasise the risk to children of having weapons in the home increased the number of weapons collected and destroyed; and (3) Mazar-E-Sharif, Afghanistan, 2011: it was assessed that moving particularly heavy vehicles in winter would damage rural roads. This would have a disproportionate impact on women and children in the surrounding villages who relied exclusively on buses to access distant education and healthcare. The operation was therefore carried out with lighter vehicles as well as excluding certain sections of road to minimise this impact.
The key legal themes from this emerging body of gender scholarship are: (1) Distinction, (2) Proportionality, and (3) access to justice for survivors of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV).
Distinction: A gender perspective on armed conflict encourages a higher standard of identification of targets. The biggest issue in this area is the over-targeting of men who are presumed to be fighters on the basis of their gender and age. This over-reliance on stereotype puts civilian men at disproportionate risk.
Another issue is the inadvertent targeting of civilian infrastructure in contexts where women and girls are not generally visible in public life. For example, a boys' school might look like a separate building with a sports pitch outside. A girls' school might be in the basement of an otherwise unrelated building. This demands a higher standard of due diligence prior to targeting.
Proportionality: A gender perspective encourages indirect unintended effects to be factored into collateral damage estimates.
For example, in the immediate aftermath of an attack, in contexts where women have lower literacy and driving rates, women and girls may be unable to respond to warnings of imminent attack or to flee following an attack. There may be increased mortality of women and girls where there is unequal or sex-segregated access to healthcare.
There are also specific weapons considerations, though more evidence is needed in this area. Medical research is by no means resolved, but there has been evidence to suggest that traumatic brain injury may be harder to detect (and therefore treat) in women than in men, and that women are more likely to develop cancer following ionising radiation exposure than men (this latter observation followed a lifespan study of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors).
In the longer term, there are various impacts on surviving relatives on a community level: the presence of armed forces can cut off water and food collection routes for women and girls, forcing them to take longer and more dangerous routes; they may have increased income-generating responsibilities, which may be difficult for women and girls to meet if they have not had access to education or the jobs market; increased care-taking responsibilities, which can increase risk of disease if caring for the sick; and there is an overarching increased risk of violence and sexual violence, be it from armed groups, civilians or intimate partners. All of these issues are more serious once civilians are internally displaced. This state of affairs shows a general trend that the less social and economic empowerment women experience in society generally, the more vulnerable they are to these indirect forms of harm.
Sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV): In 1998, the judgment from the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda reached the landmark decision that rape formed part of the crime of genocide. This decision showed: (1) the need to remove a historic ambivalence towards the prevention of SGBV in armed conflict (perhaps due to it typically being a non-lethal crime), and (2) the desire to institutionalise protection from SGBV in the response to humanitarian crises, including armed conflict. There are many obstacles in this area, but all of them can be addressed with appropriate resources: survivors may have a low level of education and not know that they have a right to justice, they may not have means to travel to urban centres to visit a court or other services, they may not have money to pay for legal advice and court fees, there may be long delays from court backlogs that put people off seeking justice, and there may be a lack of medical evidence from the time of the crime if police and health services were suspended during armed conflict. However, more difficult to address is the ambivalence in some societies towards SGBV in peace time, let alone during armed conflict.
In conclusion, the gender perspective on IHL is an important and developing field. Military planners should adopt the dual priorities of combat and human security. As the human population becomes increasingly urban, armed conflict is likely to coincide increasingly with civilian populations and infrastructure. In this way, allocating resources to gain a proper understanding of conflict zones, rather than relying on gender stereotypes, will make operations more effective. ■
Helen Broadbridge
Helen Broadbridge
Public Sector Solicitor
1. Tengroth, C. & Lindvall, K. (2015), IHL and gender - Swedish experiences, Stockholm: Swedish Red Cross and Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
2. Murphy, V. & Cameron, L. (2022), Gendered impacts of armed conflict and implications for the application of IHL, ICRC.
3. Bastick, M. (2020), Conflict-related sexual violence: exploring feminist engagements with law and armed forces, The University of Edinburgh.
