All entries on Feminist Legal Clinic’s News Digest Blog are extracts from news articles and other publications, with the source available at the link at the bottom. The content is not originally generated by Feminist Legal Clinic and does not necessarily reflect our views.
AT FiLiA we are proud to have a global team committed to ending male violence against women and girls (MVAWG).
Our choice of language is deliberate; we are not the Ending VAWG team, we are the Ending MVAWG team.
We recognise that when it comes to certain crimes, such as domestic abuse or sexual violence offences, women are statistically much more likely to be the victims, with men significantly more likely to be the perpetrators. This is not merely an esoteric matter — after all, how can we hope to combat what we cannot or will not name?
Within the team we have a number of different projects, and it would be easy to consider them as separate, distinct pieces of work.
Take our Hague Mothers’ team. They campaign against the misuse of the Hague Abduction Convention, an international treaty that was originally intended to prevent fathers from abducting their children. However, it is now increasingly used by perpetrators against mothers who have returned to their home country after fleeing domestic abuse — a form of legal abuse supported by the state.
There is an irony in the fact that the Hague Abduction Convention has become such a powerful weapon, used against the very women (and children) it was intended to protect.
Source: When protection becomes persecution: how the law is failing women and children | Morning Star