Quincey Tickner

Abstract

Purpose

The Rome Statute, especially Article 7 on Crimes against Humanity, and the principle of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) apply to widespread violations of human rights that a State fails to prohibit or protect against. Yet far too little attention has been paid to systemic crimes that take the lives of many millions of women and girls every year. The purpose of this paper is to detail a proposal to use international law to hold governments and/or their agents accountable when they fail to protect the female half of humanity from widespread and egregious crimes of violence.

Design/methodology/approach

To accelerate the movement to make women’s human rights a global priority, it examines: first, expanding the interpretation of the Rome statute, particularly Article 7 – Crimes against Humanity. Second, where necessary, amending the statute to include gender in addition to race and ethnicity.

Findings

Seven crimes and their personal, social, and economic consequences are analyzed, and legal remedies are detailed: selective female infanticide and denial to girl children of food and health care; the sex trade and sexual slavery; female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C); domestic violence (from murder in the name of honor and bride burning to acid throwing and battery); rape; child marriage and forced marriage.

Originality/value

This paper explores a new approach for use by scholars, attorneys, and human rights activists to end the global pandemic of violence against the female half of humanity by invoking the Rome Statute and/or amending it to protect women and girls. It provides a new legal and sociological analysis.

Citation

Eisler, R. (2015), “Can international law protect half of humanity? A new strategy to stop violence against women”, Journal of Aggression, Conflict and Peace Research, Vol. 7 No. 2, pp. 88-100. https://doi.org/10.1108/JACPR-12-2013-0036

by Riane Eisler, Huffington Post

The tech and automation job-quake is finally gaining attention, with predictions that nearly half of American jobs will be lost within a couple of decades. Yet too many leaders still avert their eyes, making decisions through a rear-view mirror rather than planning for a horizon already upon us. Even worse, the only “solution” floated so far is that government hand everyone an annual stipend for doing nothing at all.

Already, technology performs countless functions earlier done exclusively by people. When tablets on restaurant tables take people’s orders, software guides our shopping online (while automation increasingly controls warehouses), and driverless cars presage huge job losses in the transportation sector, we see the convulsed employment markets of tomorrow.

Even now, jobs are polarized, with large numbers of people relegated to low-wage jobs that are often part-time and without benefits. And the U.S. industrial job base is predicted to shrink as radically as the agricultural job base shrank earlier. But unlike industrialization, automation does not offer large numbers of replacement jobs.

So, what are we to do with the “surplus” populations that technological advances such as apps, “sharing economy” business models, artificial intelligence systems, and automation leave in their wake? Long ago, the liberal economist Robert Theobald proposed a guaranteed annual income, and even conservative economic godfather Milton Friedman proposed a negative income tax providing people with no-or-low earnings a government stipend.

That these measures are being proposed again makes no sense. Neither gives recipients the opportunity to do meaningful work, robbing us of necessary contributions to our socio-economic life. Nor do they reward positive behaviors and discourage harmful ones, address irresponsible economic policies and business practices, take into account the damage to our health and natural habitat of such policies and practices, or address the power imbalances that lie behind chronic economic inequity and inefficiency.

In starkest terms: the Baltimore riots may have relaunched conventional discussions about economic opportunity for communities in crisis, but we’ve heard nothing new as entire segments of employment careen towards crisis.

Yet an effective response is available to the challenges of the postindustrial world: economic policies that support and reward activities that machines and high-technology devices, no matter how sophisticated, cannot perform: being creative, flexible, and caring.

A caring economy is the best app for solving the looming jobs crisis.

When government stipends are given, they should foster the work of caring and caregiving, be it for humans or for nature’s life-support systems, in the household and community economy – investments that new metrics show have a huge payoff. We should fund training for the high-quality caring that both psychology and neuroscience show is foundational to optimal human development – especially for developing our unique human capacities for consciousness, problem-solving, creativity, and caregiving.

This means changing the rules of the game so the essential work of caring for our children, our growing elderly population, and ourselves has high value, with funds allocated for training and support, including caregiver tax and social security credits. Under these new rules, expenditures supporting parental leave, childcare, education, and health care will no longer be expensed every year, adding to government deficits, as is now the case. These expenditures will be recognized as essential investments in a nation’s most important asset: its future human capital. They will be amortized over the span of a generation, as is done for investments in the other infrastructures that make it possible for organizations to function effectively.

This approach will help ensure that we have the flexible, innovative, and caring people needed for the postindustrial era. Support for care work will cut through cycles of poverty, especially the disproportionate poverty of women worldwide due the fact they do the work of care for low or no pay. Policies that promote caring will lead to generally more caring and effective business and government practices and policies worldwide. And because people will learn to really value caring, this approach will lead to a more responsible and caring ethos for science, and hence also for the development of technology. The Caring Economy Campaign, including its new Social Wealth Economic Indicators which show the enormous economic value of the work of care, is working to achieve these goals.

What proof is there that such a holistic economic approach equips people for a future of software, apps, and automation? Look to the creators of this future themselves: the engineers of the emerging economy are poster children for how high-quality human capital provides economic vibrancy. Most have been nurtured and equipped for creativity.

The only question now is, will we equip more of our people for tomorrow?

by Riane Eisler and Valerie Young

When world markets convulse, people tend to think short term. But as a society, we must start focusing on what investors call the “long game” — re-examining our economic priorities to improve and stabilize more lives over time.

Suppose that instead of thinking only of stock markets or interest rates, we ask what kind of economic policies and practices are good for children. What helps, or prevents, children from realizing their potentials? What makes it possible for them to be healthy, get an education, and become responsible and productive adults?

What do these child-rearing issues have to do with economics? As it turns out, everything.

Read the entire article on Huffington Post here.

by Riane Eisler and Valerie Young October 5, 2015

When world markets convulse, people tend to think short term. But as a society, we must start focusing on what investors call the “long game” — re-examining our economic priorities to improve and stabilize more lives over time.

Continuing to behave as we have will only prolong economic instability and the growing gap between haves and have-nots. Our skyrocketing child poverty, incarceration, and income inequality rates are not inevitable or irreversible. They are the result of policy failures, and policies can be changed — once we re-examine and change how we think and operate.

Suppose that instead of thinking only of stock markets or interest rates, we ask what kind of economic policies and practices are good for children. What helps, or prevents, children from realizing their potentials? What makes it possible for them to be healthy, get an education, and become responsible and productive adults?

What do these child-rearing issues have to do with economics? As it turns out, everything. In our knowledge/information era, the most important capital is what economists call “high-quality human capital” — and we know from neuroscience that this mainly hinges on the quality of early care and education children receive.

Yet the recent report, Social Wealth Economic Indicators: A New System for Evaluating Economic Prosperity, shows that our nation invests less in our children — by far — than other developed nations. We must change this, and a first step is using new economic measures. Social Wealth Economic Indicators (SWEIs) demonstrate the enormous economic contribution of the work of caring for people, starting in early childhood. These new metrics are already in use by national organizations such as the women’s economic security advocates at 9 o5 to promote policies such as funding for parental and sick leave, child care, and higher pay for careworkers.

SWEIs show that the devaluation of this “women’s work” — which now more men are also undertaking, as family roles shift — causes untold suffering and is a big reason forthe disproportionate poverty of children, women, and communities of color. It is also a major obstacle to our nation’s future economic success.

Picture your neighbor caring for a young child while also looking after an aging parent. Think of the parents juggling a job with their family’s needs. Think of the workers, mostly women of color and immigrants, toiling long hours for less than a living wage in home, eldercare, and childcare. Visualize the children whose caregivers cannot provide them basics such as healthy food, medical care, books, and above all, the time and attention vital for human capacity development. Then, go back to what economists tell us: that the key to a robust economy in our new knowledge/service age is “high quality human capital.”

SWEIs reveal that our country has the lowest public funding for early childhood education and care of any other advanced nation. They also show that the U.S. is the only nation without nationally-funded paid parental leave, and has lower educational enrollment and scores. SWEIs further show we have a higher rate of income inequality, and the highest child poverty rates — and that these rates are astronomical for communities of color.

So, at a time when children of color will soon be the majority of US children, our failure to invest in care not only causes enormous suffering and inequity; it is economically self-destructive. Not only that, a more equitable and caring economy is essential for real democracy. To quote from the Social Wealth Economic Indicators report, “In countries where the rich own a growing share of income and wealth, the political process is inevitably captured by their interests, and the poor become objects of disenfranchisement and therefore discrimination. Social mistrust then grows and political and civil disorder become increasingly likely.”

Our headlines are filled with examples of exactly this “political and civil disorder” both within and without the U.S. It stands to reason that outcomes can only be better if the inputs are better too. Provided with these connections by Social Wealth Economic Indicators, policy makers can see that greater public investment in pre-school education, support for care work in homes, and better wages for caregivers will decrease economic disparity while preparing the U.S. for the economic “long game.”

SWEIs provide data on both inputs (Care Investment Indicators) and outputs(Human Capacity Indicators, and when we see both, the route from Point A to Point B emerges. These connections between inputs and outputs are the stepping-stones we can use to reach solid ground. From that ground, we can build a structural foundation to support practices and policies that much more effectively address seemingly insoluble problems such as economic instability and inequality — and pave the way for the future we need and want.

Riane Eisler is author of The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics and President of the Center for Partnership Studies (CPS).
Valerie Young is a public policy analyst and advocate for women’s economic security. She is Director of Outreach for CPS’s Caring Economy Campaign.