Africans Adopt Feminist Treaty, But Push Back Against Feminist Extremes

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NEW YORK, May 2 (C-Fam) The African Union has adopted a feminist international treaty billed as an effort to combat violence against women.  The treaty is expected to strengthen the hand of EU bureaucrats and EU-funded mechanisms on the African continent. Even so, some of the treaty provisions reflect Africa’s growing unease with EU meddling in African social policy.

In February, the fifty-five member multilateral organization of African countries announced that it adopted the African Union Convention on Ending Violence Against Women and Girls. The treaty prescribes a comprehensive set of policies for all countries in Africa to address violence against women, including criminal law enforcement, healthcare, and other social services.

While the treaty has largely been sanitized by conservative African countries, it reflects the overall approach to women’s issues of Western liberal countries. For example, it requires countries to promote “positive masculinities”—a technical term coined by feminist idealogues in academia to refer to acceptable ways for men to behave.

Similarly, the treaty does not refer to “domestic violence” anywhere but refers to “femicide” and violence perpetrated by “intimate partners” instead. This reflects European preferences for individualistic policy and for legitimizing non-marital sexual unions, rather than seeing the family as the social unit affected by domestic violence.

The treaty requires countries to pursue the objectives of the treaty through a “multi-stakeholder approach,” which implies funding for and partnering with non-governmental organizations. Because most African countries don’t have the luxury of civil society organizations, this approach is another way in which Western-backed groups and UN agencies will gain a foothold on the African continent.

The treaty addresses “harmful practices” like female genital mutilation and child marriage, but it does not refer anywhere to the threat to women and girls from pornography, including violent pornography, prostitution, and sex trafficking.

The treaty also bolsters the implementation of EU-backed agreements like the “Maputo Protocol” and the “AU Strategy for Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment” which declare access to abortion to be a right in cases of rape, incest, and health emergencies, and even promote medical abortion as part of the right to sexual and reproductive health.

Rather than using the universally accepted definition of gender in the hard-law Rome Statute creating the International Criminal Court, which defined gender as “the two sexes, male and female, within the context of society” and nothing more, the new African treaty adopted a social definition of gender as referring to the “roles, duties and responsibilities which are culturally or socially ascribed to a particular gender.” Even though this is not an overt endorsement of gender ideology, it leaves the door open for Western countries to use gender ideology to implement the treaty.

The treaty also leaves open the possibility of countries recognizing homosexual unions as equivalent to the family. It does not force countries to recognize homosexual unions but leaves it up to countries to decide to do so, which appears to repudiate the definition of the family as the “natural and fundamental group unit” of society currently enshrined in international law.

While the overall tone of the treaty reflects Western priorities and concerns, there are aspects of the treaty that show how Africans are pushing back against Western social policies. The treaty does not have any specific obligations pertaining to abortion. It does not include key feminist terms like “gender-based violence.” It also leaves out the term “intersectional” discrimination, opting for “interconnected” instead. The former is a technical term to promote gender ideology and homosexuality, the latter is defined in the treaty without reference to such issues.

Perhaps the biggest evidence of African resistance to European intervention in African social policy is in the treaty’s emphasis on the importance of the family. The objective of the treaty includes victims’ families as the primary beneficiaries of policies to address violence against women. This is not something Europeans are generally open to acknowledging.

 

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