“Human Rights Protection, Democratic Deliberation”
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finally that prevention is a fundamental step toward addressing
VAW. Now in everyday language, the relationship between
prevention and protection seems mutually reinforcing. For example,
we can prevent by protecting and we can protect by preventing. So
it is important that I draw out the basic distinction. As I will spell
out, timely and early interventions by the law and the police that
protect victims of VAW before acts of violence occur are
preventions
. But as I will argue in this article the term protection
has been over-applied and lends itself to abuse, to the extent that it
has come to refer to the decision made on pragmatic considerations,
which have emerged from democratic deliberations that show
sensitivities to local contexts and customs.
In the traditional way of doing political science, political
theory tends to be normative rather than empirical. However, much
of political theory in contemporary setting is in fact empirical,
evidence-based analyses of specific phenomena, cases, patterns, and
possibilities. While not disavowing the traditional way of
understanding political theory, this article situates itself within the
contemporary sense. Thus, as will become clear, some arguments
are drawn from proposals and advances that are mostly empirical.
I begin in Section I with a brief discussion of the campaign
that coalesced around VAW. I will attempt to capture what ought
to be most significant in our concerns about how to address it.
Then, I will examine in Sections II and III the human rights and the
contextually wise, democratic-deliberative approaches, respectively,
and identify their weaknesses and limitations. By way of supplying
an alternative, I will make my intervention in Section IV. My
argument will be that strategic measures closer to the ground,
which are in fact enforced by the police, have the greatest potential
to make a genuine difference in preventing VAW.
I will explore two
further issues in Section V, especially the due diligence standard
that has emerged from within the global campaign to eradicate
VAW.
Finally, bringing this article to close, I will add mention of
the usual caveats that apply to any attempt at addressing VAW. The
