Conceptualizing Intimate Violence and Gender Equality: A Comparative Approach
Part I discusses the treatment of domestic violence as a human rights issue under international law, focusing on the shift in the conceptualization of violence against women from a private matter to a human rights issue. By framing gender-based violence as a means to perpetuate the social, economic, and political inequality of women, the international community has imposed positive obligations upon the state to not only punish but to prevent gender-based violence and to eliminate its root causes. In Parts II and III, I contrast the approaches of the highest courts of the United States and South Africa. Part II analyzes the conceptualization of domestic violence as a private crime by the U.S. Supreme Court and its refusal to constitutionalize a right to be free of genderbased violence. By framing gender-based violence within the framework of formal equality, the Supreme Court erases the relationship between intimate violence and women’s full and equal enjoyment of their fundamental constitutional rights and benefits. The refusal of the Supreme Court to conceptualize intimate violence as an issue of equality threatens the potential of criminal justice reforms to obligate the state to eradicate gender-based violence. The criminalization of intimate violence sends a strong normative message that such conduct violates important social norms and will not be tolerated by the state. Focusing on criminal justice reforms that punish perpetrators, however, can reinforce the traditional notion that intimate violence is the result of individual deviance rather than the systematic subordination of women in society. Part III analyzes the approach of the South African Constitutional Court, which has explicitly conceptualized intimate violence as a means of gender subordination that denies women equality, self-determination, and access to fundamental rights and liberties. The Court has held that the South African Constitution imposes affirmative obligations on the state to prevent and rectify intimate violence. In construing violence against women as a violation of the right to equality, the Court repeatedly has emphasized that the Constitution guarantees substantive rather than formal equality. The Court also has recognized the inter-relatedness of the rights guaranteed by the Constitution, holding that rights to equality, liberty, and dignity are meaningless in the absence of the fulfillment of basic socioeconomic rights. The Court’s jurisprudence, therefore, has tremendous potential to transform both the legal and the socioeconomic subordination of women that reflect and perpetuate violence against women. CONCEPTUALIZING INTIMATE VIOLENCE AND GENDER EQUALITY: A COMPARATIVE APPROACH
Violence Against Women in South Africa: The Role of Culture and the Limitations of the Law
This paper describes the role of culture in perpetuating violence against women. It does this by contextualizing violence against women in South Africa within the grand project of transformation taking place there, and highlighting the possibilities of fundamental restructuring, with respect to rights and equality for women, when the feminist project intersects with the non-racial project. The paper, therefore, visits a familiar question, namely, the obstacles to transformation when the eradication of racism takes precedence over the elimination of sexism, as it historically has in South Africa. In addition, this paper describes recent attempts by the legislature and courts in South Africa to curb violence against women. This paper concludes by focusing on the possibilities and limitations of the law in eradicating violence against women, and argues that a comprehensive approach involving institutions other than the law would ultimately be more fruitful.
The Area of Freedom, Security and Justice ten years on: Successes and future challenges under the Stockholm Programme. CEPS Paperbacks. June 2010
This book celebrates the tenth anniversary of the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ) by bringing together the views of key practitioners and policy-makers who have played an outstanding role in thinking about and shaping EU policies on freedom, security and justice. 
 
Ten years ago, the member states transferred competences to the EU for law and policy-making in the fields of immigration, asylum and border controls, and began the transfer process for criminal justice and policing. This decade of European cooperation on AFSJ policies has experienced very dynamic convergence, the enactment of a large body of European law and the setting-up of numerous EU agencies working in these domains. Such dynamism in policy-making has not been without challenges and vulnerabilities, however. As this collective volume shows, the main dilemmas that lie ahead relate to an effective (while more plural) institutional framework under the Treaty of Lisbon, stronger judicial scrutiny through a greater role for national courts and the Court of Justice in Luxembourg, better mechanisms for evaluating and monitoring the implementation of EU AFSJ law and a more solid fundamental rights strategy. The contributions in this volume address the progress achieved so far in these policy areas, identify the challenges for future European cooperation in the AFSJ and put forward possible paths for making more progress in the next generation of the EU’s AFSJ.