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protections for women are concretely enforced, namely the
enforcement of protections within the implementation process, has
been obscured. By shining light on this component, call it the
enforcement
component, I suggest that the concept of protection
need not be comprehensively written off, but rather transformed.
The outcome will be a conception of protection geared toward
prevention.
9
This alternative, unlike the growing consensus on
multi-pronged approaches, is piecemeal in nature. Based upon some
of the most innovative police strategies and exemplary legal
mandates that have effectively put into force the protections of
women, it might be called the policing approach.
Although I shift the unit of analysis to prevention, I cannot
discuss every aspect of it. So as a matter of clarification, let me spell
out my three assumptions. I assume that the monopoly of violence
by the modern state (Weber, 1970: 78) justifies in whole or in part
the prevention of violence which includes VAW. I assume further
that preventing violence forms a component of the state’s role of
protecting individual autonomy (Raz, 1986: 367-429). I assume
9
Some may think we already have a cogent argument of prevention, but that is
empirically false. In spite of having been adopted by the 1993 Vienna
Declaration
and other international instruments, the due diligence standard has “largely
neglect[ed] the obligation to prevent” VAW (Ertürk, 2006: 2). (The reason has to
do with state-centric implementations of international human rights standards, as
will be spelled out in Section II. In Section V, the due diligence standard’s failings
will be made clear.) In the same vein,
in spite of going to great length to specify
legal mandates and procedures, as it turns out, the “mandatory proceedings
do
not
necessarily prevent abusers from retaliating against victims” (Friedman, 2003:
148, emphasis added). Similarly, there are practical difficulties with the argument
of prohibition, which defends that the “state should prohibit those [social]
practices which cause significant harms” to the individuals choosing them
(Chambers, 2008: 201). For example, it is unclear who has the political mandates,
the legitimate authorities to prohibit the harmful (unjust, unequal, and sexist)
practices. One might ask, what sorts of powers, and what is the nature of these
powers, that are applied to bring about prohibition? Without spelling out some of
the details, the usual worries about the paternalistic state cannot be dismissed out
of hand. This article is in part a response to these concerns and in part an attempt
at preventing VAW with a piecemeal approach that may be effectively applied.
