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A Challenge For Human Rights: 
What We Can Do 
by Riane Eisler

Human society is based, first and foremost, on the relations between the female and male halves of humanity and on their relations with their sons and daughters. Our very first lessons about human relations and thus also about human rights are learned in the private sphere. This is where people learn to respect the rights to freedom from violence, cruelty, oppression, and discrimination - or where they learn violence, cruelty, oppression and discrimination.

So, logically speaking, in a world where human rights are truly valued the distinction between private and public violence, cruelty, oppression, and discrimination would be seen as absurd. Yet many people still today see private or family relations as separate and distinct, or at best far less important, than political and economic relations. Indeed, human rights theory has traditionally been based on this view. Thus, the splitting off of human rights- focusing on the rights of adult free white males - from women's rights and also children's rights was established. And this in turn led to the accompanying distinction in human rights theory and practice between the public (or men's) world and the private world, to which women and children were still generally confined by custom, and sometimes also law.

The Public and Private Sphere
Only as we begin to apply one standard to human rights violations, whether they occur inside or outside the family, can we see how the distinction between the public and private spheres has served to prevent the application of human rights standards to the most formative and fundamental human relations. And we also begin to see how this double standard for human rights in the private and public spheres has not only resulted in the failure to protect the rights of women and children, but to maintain the kind of society in which people learn very early to accept cruel and oppressive human relations in both the private and public spheres as the norm.

For instance under the English Common Law that developed during a time when monarchs maintained their rule through ear and force, husbands were legally permitted to beat their wives if they disobeyed them - the well-known phrase rule of thumb goes back to a legal reform decreeing that the stick a man used could be no thicker than his thumb. And throughout history regimes noted for their human rights violations, such as Hitler's Germany, Khomeini's Iran, Stalin's Soviet Union, and Zia's Pakistan, have made the return of women to their traditional (or subservient) place a priority. Similarly in the United States those who would push us back to the good old days when men and women still knew their place have opposed equal rights for women, and the rightist-fundamentalists even pushed for a Family Protection Act that would have cut funding for battered women's shelters - thus protecting a family structure where male heads of household can violently exercise despotic control.

This connection between rigid male domination in the family and despotism in the state also helps explain the Moslem fundamentalist custom, in chronically violent areas such as the Middle East - where terrorism is seen as legitimate and honorable - of not bringing men to trial for honorkillings of their wives, sisters, and daughters for any suspected sexual infraction. For it is through the rule of terror in the family that both women and men learn to accept rule by terror as normal in their own societies or against other groups or nations.

The link between cruelty and violence in the private sphere of the family and the cruelty and violence of scapegoating, authoritarianism, and other forms of oppression and domination in the political sphere is all too real. Like the submerged mass of an iceberg with only its tip in view, traditions of domination and violence in the private sphere have been the still generally invisible foundations of domination and violence in the more visible political or public sphere. For the basic fact is that people learn how to behave in their families; they learn what behaviors will be rewarded, punished, or not punished - and thus effectively condoned. And as long as acts of cruelty and violence in peoples families are condoned rather than condemned and prosecuted, not only will these continue from generation to generation, but so also will acts of cruelty and violence outside of the family.

From Domination to Partnership
Today, as never before in human history, the world stands at a crossroads. On the one side is the well-trodden path of violence and domination -- of man over women, man over man, parent over child, race over race, nation over nation, and man over nature. This is the road leading to a world of totalitarian controls and nuclear or ecological disaster. On the other side lies a very different path: the road to a world where our basic civil, political, and economic rights - including protection from domination and violence will be respected, and our natural environment will be protected from man's fabled "conquest of nature". This is the road that could take us to a new era of human partnership and peace. In my work I use the terms domination and partnership in a specific way, to describe two contrasting models of social organization. In the dominator model, human differences - beginning with the differences between male and female - are automatically equated with inferiority or superiority, with those deemed superior (men) doing the dominating of those deemed inferior (women). In this model, human rights are, by definition, severely limited, as the whole system is held together by fear and force.

By contrast, in the partnership model - again beginning with the difference between women and men - difference is not automatically equated with inferiority or superiority. Here boys and girls do not learn early on to divide humanity into "in-groups" and "out-groups". For here both halves of humanity are equally valued. And here softer or feminine values such as caring, nonviolence, and empathy can be given social and economic precedence, since here men do not have to be socialized for domination and conquest. So here human rights can in fact and not just theory be protected in both the so-called private and public spheres.

Today more and more people are challenging traditions of force-backed domination in the so-called private sphere of day-to-day interpersonal relations. Not so very long ago, the common wisdom was "spare the rod and spoil the child". Today we are beginning to recognize child beating as child abuse. Indeed, today long-ignored traditions of violence against women and children are, for the first time in history, being brought out into the open -- and prosecuted.

This includes traditions that until recently in most parts of the world have been considered a strictly private or family matter, such as wife-beating, which according to the U.S. Department of Justice occurs every 15 seconds, and sexual molestation, according to the latest estimates affecting a third of all girls in the U.S. today. This also includes traditions such as murder of females, for instance, selective starving of girl children, bride burning in India, so-called honor killings, female genital mutilation, and all kinds of other physical abuse. For all these are finally being recognized as brutal means of maintaining male sexual control over both the bodies and psyches of women. And increasingly customs like the payment of bride price and dowry -- where women (often mere children) are sold by their own parents into arranged marriages to bear a man children and work for him from dawn to dusk -- are recognized for what they are: a form of slave trade.

Decades after segregation based on race became a major human rights issue - the segregation based on gender, which is still the norm in many parts of the world (including whole nations such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, and Pakistan), is being recognized as a means of effectively barring one group (women) from equal access to education and employment, even freedom of movement. The custom of segregating jobs into women's and men's work, with work assigned to women given lower status and pay regardless of requirements, of skill and education, is also increasingly recognized for what it is: an arbitrary and unjust means to maintain the subordination of half of the world's population.

The Challenge for Change
These are all major changes in consciousness that must be accompanied by social and political action if they are to manifest themselves in changed institutional infrastructures. During the past two decades there have been two United Nations conventions that specifically deal with the human rights of the hitherto generally excluded majority -- women and children. The first is the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, ratified in 1981, which explicitly moves beyond the spurious distinction between the public and private spheres. The second is the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which likewise focuses heavily on the private or familial sphere. Both are important steps toward a new integrated approach to human rights.

This takes us to some proposals for specific action. We need to make our voices heard to ensure that current efforts to include women in policy-making positions are radically accelerated. For if human rights are to be truly respected, a new kind of global leadership is urgently needed. This is a leadership in which both halves of humanity -- women and men -- as well as values stereotypically considered feminine, such as nonviolence, empathy and caretaking, are fully integrated into all aspects of policy making. Indeed, if we are committed to supporting democracy in the world, steps to address the undemocratic under-representation (and in the case of the United Nations, virtual exclusion) of women from policy-making decision should logically be a top policy priority. It makes no sense to talk about valuing diversity, providing equal representation for racial and ethnic minorities, as long as the exclusion of women from policy making roles continues. For as long as people learn to practice or accept discrimination based on the most fundamental biological difference in our species - the difference between women and men - they are not going to eradicate discrimination based on other differences.

The Media, Education, and Human Rights
We need to reorganize governmental and non-governmental human rights organizations and launch an international mass media human rights education campaign focusing on stopping violence and abuse in the family as the basis for a less violent, more peaceful, and more truly democratic world.

Television, films, rock music and comics continue to bombard the world with images of violence as entertainment. Millions of young people are shown men engaged in beatings, rapes, murders, and even dismemberment and torture with women frequently portrayed only in the role of victims. All this of course effectively accustoms young people to view domination and violence as normal, and even fun -- thus further teaching us to be insensitive to people's pain and human rights. We need to pressure the mass media to instead model non-violent and humane interpersonal and international relations -- beginning with education to recognize human rights violations in our intimate relations: the day-to-day relations between men and women, parents and children.

In this connection, the international Year of the Family with talk of "supporting and strengthening the family" opens the way to raising a fundamental, though still rarely articulated issue: what kind of family do we want to support and strengthen. If it is a partnership family where the rights of all members are fully recognized and implemented, there is good reason for long-range hope for a less violent and more democratic world. For the only realistic way to break cycles of violence -- be they interpersonal or international -- is by changing the way women and men, parents and children from generation to generation have been taught to condone, accept, and all too often participate in abusive and violent relations that in the international arena, through ever more deadly weapons, today threaten our very survival. The shift from a dominator to a partnership social and ideological organization is a long-range goal that will require fundamental changes at all levels of society. But I believe that we can build a better future: a less violent and more humane world.

However, this can only be done with policies firmly rooted in an understanding of the link between the private and the public spheres and a new approach to human rights addressing not only the rights of man but the human rights of the neglected majority: women and children.

From: WIN NEWS. 19-4, Autumn 1993. Fran Hosken, Editor. 187
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