by AYESHA IMAM, ISABEL MARLER, & LAILA MALIK
Kurdish women march against “ISIS” in London on International Women’s Day 2015 PHOTO/Isabel Marler
Dealing with the escalation of violence against women across the world requires a wider adoption of a feminist approach to working at the nexus of development, religious fundamentalisms and women’s rights.
In August 2015, the United Nations adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the agenda that will guide global development priorities until 2030. The agenda is not without its shortcomings, but the inclusion of a stand-alone goal to “Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls” and the recognition of gender equality as “a crucial contribution to progress across all the Goals and targets” constitute a significant step up from the minimal gender commitments of its predecessor, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). However, the widespread growth of religious fundamentalisms across the world stand as a huge barrier to achieving the transformation envisioned by the SDGs.
Fareeda Afridi, a Pashtun feminist and women’s rights activist in Pakistan who criticised patriarchy and the Taliban, was shot dead on her way to work in July 2012, at the age of 25. Talata Mallam was one of nine women polio vaccinators shot and killed in attacks in Kano, Nigeria in February 2013. In November 2015, Jennifer Markovsky, Garrett Swasey, and Ke’Arre Stewart were killed by a Christian extremist at a Planned Parent Federation Clinic in Colorado Springs, USA. Attacks by fundamentalists in Bangladesh on NGOs like BRAC and the Grameen Bank, which provide health, information, education services and economic opportunities particularly to rural women, have included beating and killing NGO workers and burning hospitals. These are just a few examples of the thousands of attacks by religious fundamentalists of all persuasions on women’s rights and development work.
Religious fundamentalisms degrade human rights standards, roll back women’s rights, entrench discrimination, and increase violence and insecurity. However, fundamentalists do not only use physical force. Fundamentalist forces are selectively using human rights language, with culturally relativist arguments, to attack existing international human rights standards, and block progress. Yet, so far, little work has been done to address the specific challenge of religious fundamentalisms to development or to formulate effective responses.
A worldwide problem for women’s rights
The control of women’s bodily autonomy and the policing of strict gender norms is a hallmark of fundamentalist ideology that transcends all religious and geographical boundaries.
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