On March 14, 2018, black Brazilian activist and politician Marielle Franco was murdered in Rio De Janeiro. The city councilwoman was an outspoken feminist and human rights defender who decried police violence and gun violence affecting impoverished neighborhoods. On her way home from an event she planned called Young Black Women Shifting Social Structures, she and her driver were shot and killed in their car. Following her death, thousands of protesters took to the streets, many holding signs suggesting she was killed because of her activism.

Franco is not the first female politician to be killed for her views. In recent years, women politicians around the world have been victims of online attacks, as well as high-profile acts of physical violence. Diane Abbott, a prominent female Member of Parliament (MP) of color in the United Kingdom, received over 8,000 abusive tweets in the six weeks prior to the 2017 Parliamentary elections. This is a prevalent type of harassment faced by female politicians, and in some cases, this harassment has escalated into physical violence. Jo Cox, British Labour Party MP, was murdered in 2016; the perpetrator attributed his actions to Cox’s defense of the European Union and immigrant communities. Bolivian councilor Juana Quispe was found strangled in 2012; she had been helping other female politicians file harassment complaints. Angiza Shinwari, a provincial councilor in east Afghanistan and advocate for women’s rights, was killed by a targeted bomb attack in 2015.

While some may suggest that violence targeting female politicians is simply a result of increasing representation of women in politics, research suggests that female politicians experience violence because they are female, and in gendered ways. This violence can be physical (including sexual), psychological, and/or economic; occurs in both public and private spaces (including online and domestic violence); and is perpetrated both by political opponents and people known to the victims, such as their intimate partners or members of their own political parties (Bardall/IFES, 2011).  A 2016 study conducted by the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) surveyed 55 women parliamentarians in 39 countries, focusing on their experiences as politicians and violence they may have experienced. The majority of those surveyed experienced psychological violence: 65%% said they had been subjected to humiliating sexist remarks, and 44%% reported receiving threats of death, rape, beatings or abduction. This study notes also that these types of violence against female parliamentarians have the intent and impact of dissuading them or female colleagues from participating in politics.

Some organizations have already made important strides in understanding this field and working to mitigate these disturbing trends of violence and harassment, including the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES), the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), which are both ACE partners, and UN Women. IFES has created the Election Violence Education and Resolution (EVER) program, which collects publicly-verifiable data on election-related violence. It has been used in 13 elections since 2003, and there is gender-disaggregated data available for six of these cases. IFES also developed Violence Against Women in Elections: A Framework for Assessment, Monitoring, and Response to identify and address specific challenges related to gender-based violence in elections. In collaboration with UNDP, UN Women has also published Preventing Violence Against Women in Elections: A Programming Guide, which seeks to aid technical assistance providers in identifying and documenting Violence Against Women in Elections (VAWE). In addition, the National Democratic Institute (NDI) launched its Votes Without Violence toolkit in 2016, which serves to aid citizen observer groups in collecting data about VAWE in every phase of the electoral cycle.

Violence against women in politics is a burgeoning field of research, but more data needs to be collected to fully understand the nature of the problem, particularly from a comparative perspective. This need informed the setting of a recent workshop on Violence Against Women in Elections, held by The Carter Center’s Democracy Program and Emory University’s Institute for Developing Nations, following a preliminary 2017 meeting in Uppsala, Sweden. Some of the world’s leading scholars in this field attended the workshop including Gabrielle Bardall, Mona Lena Krook, Elin Bjarnegard, and Jennifer Piscopo, as well as representatives of organizations working on violence against women in politics and on broader election issues.

One of the goals of the workshop was to foster collaboration between different stakeholders to fully understand the scale and scope of violence against women in elections, and to think more deeply about the challenges of data collection and analysis.  For example, much of psychological violence against women occurs in online spaces, which are difficult to study because of the sheer volume of threats and the anonymity and privacy of perpetrators.

Additionally, violence against women in politics often occurs in the private sphere, which poses barriers to observation. Participants also discussed the roles that different election stakeholders in both the election and human rights arenas can play in addressing these challenges and providing a fuller understanding of women’s experiences as candidates, elected officials, election officials, voters and other electoral stakeholders. For example, election observation missions can address data collection challenges by training staff to ask context-specific questions related to women’s absence from the electoral process and their experiences of political violence. Additionally, observers and election management bodies can disaggregate data they already collect on physical violence by sex. Election observation missions can also be more intentional in ensuring that gender is streamlined into the recommendations of needs and assessment reports.

The Carter Center shared these reflections and suggestions at a subsequent Expert Group Meeting on Violence Against Women in Politics.  This meeting was organized by UN Women and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, in collaboration with IPU and NDI, and convened by Dubravka Šimonović, the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, Its Causes and Consequences. The lessons and recommendations shared during this Expert Group Meeting will support a thematic report to be presented by the Special Rapporteur to the UN General Assembly later this year.  The meeting is one small part of UN Women’s ongoing work to raise awareness and shape policy regarding violence against women in politics.

The impact of violence on elections is recognized as the subject of academic study and targeted programming.  Now it is critical that the forms of violence that affect women and adversely impact their political participation, receive equal attention from practitioners, election managers and observation groups. ACE partners are among those charting new paths forward.