“One hundred thirty-seven women are killed by a family member every day,” said Beth Schlachter, Executive Director of Family Planning 2020. “That’s a staggering statistic.” She spoke at a recent Wilson Center event about gender-based violence (GBV) in conflict and humanitarian settings in partnership with CARE, the International Rescue Committee (IRC), Save the Children, and the Women’s Refugee Commission. The event was a part of a Wilson Center series recognizing the United Nation’s “16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence” and commemorated our friend and colleague, Jennifer Schlecht.

The rights of women and girls are “fundamentally undermined” when they are subjected to gender-based violence, said Schlachter. Unfortunately, GBV is not uncommon. Thirty-five percent of women worldwide have experienced physical or sexual violence. Individuals living in conflict and humanitarian settings are particularly vulnerable, as violence against women increases in times of crisis, she said. This phenomenon makes addressing GBV in these settings especially urgent.

Shifting Mindsets

To address the problem, we must first change how we define humanitarian work, said the panelists. Many in the international community do not view GBV response and prevention as humanitarian work, instead considering it long-term development work, said Joan Timoney, Vice President of Advocacy and External Relations for the Women’s Refugee Commission. However, this view overlooks the gendered aspects of crises, which leave women and girls more vulnerable to harm. It also does not account for the critical role that women play in humanitarian responses. For example, they are often first responders, constituting 70 percent of global healthcare workforces. Thus, prioritizing the safety of women and girls is essential to humanitarian efforts. Taking action against GBV is central to the humanitarian mandate, said Timoney.

In fragile settings, it is impossible to prioritize one socioeconomic crisis over the other, said Sarah Ashraf, Director of Maternal, Neonatal, and Reproductive Health at Save the Children. To meet the demands of these overlapping crises, communities must be able to deploy all available resources and knowledge. They cannot do so if an entire segment of the population is not protected and is systematically excluded from the process. The needs of women and girls tend to be left out of responses due to a “critical gap in women’s leadership in humanitarian settings,” said Christina Haneef, Emergency Response Specialist for Gender in Emergencies at CARE. Thus, humanitarian responses that do not prioritize gender equality will be ineffective and potentially even detrimental, said Timoney.

Shaping Institutions

We must shift our institutional frameworks to reflect this shift in mindset, said the panelists. Integrating gender equality into humanitarian action has to be “well-funded standard operating procedure,” said Timoney. One initiative pushing for this shift is the Call to Action on Protection from Gender-Based Violence in Emergencies (or the “Call to Action”).

The Call to Action’s goal involves driving change and fostering accountability within the humanitarian sphere so that every humanitarian effort, from the start, provides safe and comprehensive services to those affected by GBV, to prevent GBV, and to mitigate GBV risks, especially violence against women and girls. The Call to Action’s roadmap focuses on six areas: institutional policy development, stakeholder coordination, data collection, funding, services for survivors, and risk mitigation. Partners make specific, measurable commitments in each area and report back on their annual progress, said Timoney.

Of these areas, data collection is especially important. Routinely collected, gender-disaggregated data is paramount to understanding the real-time and distinct needs of the women, men, boys, and girls affected by crisis, said Haneef. Such data can guide action steps. For example, CARE implemented gender-responsive programming in Myanmar after their 2017 research uncovered GBV concerns among refugees.

Empowering Communities

These broader institutional frameworks must be tailored to communities, said the panelists. Although guidelines are beneficial, every crisis and every community is different. If the factors contributing to GBV in a given context are not examined, GBV prevention and response efforts will be insufficient, said Ashraf.

Providing communities with avenues for meaningful participation is essential to this process, said Haneef. The communities receiving services have a deep knowledge of their circumstances and needs—one that can only come from lived experience. “They know each other in ways that we never will,” said Schlachter. Instead of looking at populations in need of services as “clients,” we need to empower them as “partners,” she said.

Partnering with communities also fosters trust between institutions and the populations that they serve. This is critical, said Ashraf. GBV survivors face many barriers to seeking services, including stigma. However, once an organization has established trust with a community—for example, through the provision of nutrition services—survivors will be more likely to turn to that organization for GBV services as well, said Ashraf.

One way to foster trust is to partner with local women’s rights groups, said Jennate Eoomkham, Lead of the International Rescue Committee’s “Building Local, Thinking Global” project. These organizations understand the issues facing their communities and can tap their established networks to facilitate service provision. Establishing local partnerships also allows humanitarian organizations to provide long-term mentorship to frontline workers, as opposed to just one-time trainings, allowing them to build long-term capacity within communities, said Ashraf. Perhaps most importantly, recognizing and empowering local women’s organizations helps ensure that international actors amplify the voices of survivors and their communities, rather than co-opting the conversation, said Eoomkham.

Implications for the New Administration

To amplify the voice of a survivor, Ashraf shared the words of an adolescent who received GBV services from Save the Children. “If this was happening in other countries, if something like this happened to a child, half the earth would know and would demonstrate,” the girl said, referring to sexual violence. “No light has been shed on us, which means that everything has become something normal.” It is the job of humanitarian actors to shed that light, to challenge that definition of normal, and to uplift women and girls throughout the process, said the panelists. This job has only become more pressing due to COVID-19. The incidence of GBV has risen significantly during the pandemic, with calls to helplines increasing five-fold in some countries, said Schlachter.

With the advent of the Biden-Harris Administration, there is a new sense of urgency to address COVID-19 at home and abroad. As the administration crafts its recovery plans, it must incorporate gender equality and empowerment at every level. Doing so will help President Biden and Vice President Harris live up to their core campaign promise: to build back not merely to a pre-pandemic normalcy but to build back better. They should aim to achieve a new normal—one where no woman or girl is subjected to the horror of gender-based violence.