Gender Integration

• To what extent are “general” human rights organizations
and other civil society organizations (CSOs) working to
advocate for gender equality and promote and protect
the rights of women, girls, and LGBTI people? Are women
leading or playing prominent roles in these organizations?
• To what extent do prominent women’s rights organizations
advocate for the rights of women and girls with disabilities,
rural women, and minority women? Does their membership
and activist reach extend beyond the national capitals or
major urban centers?
• What role are women and men in religious and faith-based
communities playing to defend women and girls’ rights?
• What, if any, protections are in place for women agricultural,
factory, office, and domestic workers? If women workers file
charges of trafficking, assault, or abuse, are the cases likely
to be prosecuted and given a fair hearing?
• What measures are in place to uphold the rights of adults
and children with disabilities and to ensure that women and
girls with disabilities receive equitable treatment?
• How do restrictive gender norms contribute to the ways
traffickers coerce and manipulate women, girls, men, boys,
and gender non-conforming people? What are the patterns
and differences in how traffickers profit from the forced
labor of women, girls, men, and boys?
Human Rights Issues and the Record on Human
Rights Protection
• Which actors and institutions—state, corporate, political,
religious, and social—are perpetrating systematic human
rights violations and abuses? What are the similarities and
differences in how they target men and women? How do
homophobia and gender stereotypes and norms about
“good” and “bad” women and men play a role in their
propaganda and in media reporting (or silence) about
the crimes?
• What do women’s rights, LGBTI rights, and minority rights
organizations, along with unions and farmers’ associations,
report as the most pressing women’s rights and
gender-based challenges in the country?
• To what extent do gender-based human rights violations,
such as forced sterilization, forced marriage, systematic
denial of public health services to poor or disabled women,
or failures of police protection for sexual assault, domestic
violence, and gay bashing receive media coverage or investigation,
due process from the legal system, or any form of
government redress?
• To what extent does the state—either via services or the
formal legal system—protect people from gender-based
human rights abuses justified by ethnic or religious culture
and tradition?
• How do land grabbing and violations of indigenous people’s
rights affect men and women in different and similar ways?
• To what extent are laws against child marriage, dowry,
and domestic violence and laws guaranteeing women’s
inheritance and property rights enforced?
SECTION II. Integrating Gender into
Human Rights Programming: Challenges
and Opportunities
1. Environment Building
Challenge: Ensuring normative frameworks, institutions, and
actors are strengthened to help safeguard against human rights
violations and abuses and linking the promotion of cultures of
tolerance and respect for human rights with the prevention of
human rights violations and abuses.
Opportunities:
• Participation in international advocacy. Fund and facilitate
opportunities for LGBTI people and diverse women,
including women with disabilities and ethnic and religious
minority women, to attend treaty body meetings and to
participate in annual CSW meetings and international
exchanges, trainings, workshops, and high-level meetings
with policymakers.
• Coalition-building. Facilitate and support connections
between organizations and activists focused on women’s
rights and on political and religious rights, for example, to
facilitate gender mainstreaming in national human rights
discourse and programs and to strengthen understanding
of and activism related to the interconnectedness of
human rights.
• Sharing the evidence base. Provide workshops for CSOs,
media, law enforcement, government officials, NHRIs,
the judiciary, and other stakeholders, both to strengthen
their understanding of the evidence on and causes of
gender-based discrimination and violence and to share
examples of effective methods of dealing with the gender
norms and prejudice that make remedy more challenging.
16 USAID | Gender Integration in Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance (DRG) Programming Toolkit