Multidimensional security from a rights-based and gender-equality perspective

Citizen security:
A question of human rights

CIM, in collaboration with the IACHR, the IIHR and OHCHR and as part of the OAS General Assembly, organized a side event on the human rights of women and young people in a context of citizen security

  • Agenda (Word, only available in Spanish)
  • See the full event on video (only available in Spanish)
  • Read the IACHR Press Release (HTML)
  • Briefing note: A rights-based and gender equality approach to citizen security (Word)

The lack of citizen security constitutes one of the principal threats to stability, democratic governance, and sustainable human development. In Latin America and the Caribbean, the murder rate is double the worldwide average, and in some areas it is five times as high. A region that is home to just 8% of the world's population accounts for 42% of the homicides and 66% of the kidnappings worldwide

Although citizen insecurity is a problem that affects the entire population, we can attest that women experience violence, dispossession, trafficking, and other security problems differently than men — a difference that results mainly from the construction of gender social roles. As a UNDP Costa Rica report states, "This is not about a simple quantitative difference, for example, in the number of homicides of men and women, or in who commits them."

However, as Rainero states, "...it is possible to note that not only public debates about the lack of safety in cities, but also public policies and actions directed to fight this problem, are based on indicators that reduce violence to criminal typologies that generally exclude violence against women."

Although all human rights exist in both the private and public sphere, violence against women (in particular, intra-family or domestic violence) is still considered at a social level to be a private problem, one to be resolved by the couple, rather than a threat to women's citizen security. This has meant that in practice the issue is not included in national public policies on citizen security, nor is it visible as part of the work of protection being carried out by the security sector in most countries of the region

The failure to consider the security needs of women, on the one hand, and their absence in the spaces for decision-making and action regarding citizen security, on the other, means that the security policies of the majority of countries in the region ignore more than 50% of the population of these countries. This means in practice that women are less able, and less likely, to approach security-sector bodies about the violence they are suffering

Within this context, CIM has prioritized the following areas of work:

  • Lead policy dialogue on the democratization of the security sector from a gender perspective and negotiate a hemispheric agenda for gender and multi-dimensional security
  • Promote women’s rights and gender equality in OAS policies and programmes on multi-dimensional security
  • Support the participation of women in decision-making processes on the issue of security
  • Strengthen the capacity of civil society, in particular women’s groups, to monitor the security sector from a gender perspective.