Using a Multi-Tiered Analysis to Reconceptualize Gender-Based Violence against Women as a Matter of International Human Rights

This article explores the limits of the violence against women paradigm. Part I examines the phenomenon of women abusing their children, and points out how this phenomenon challenges the prevalent paradigm of violent men, violated women and patriarchy. Part II analyses the purposes of the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women and highlights, and argues that there are serious problems with DEVAW's underlying gender-based view of violence against women. Part III puts forward a three-tiered reconceptualisation of violence against women that goes beyond the idea that such violence is simply a function of patriarchy. Part IV tells two stories of women who prostituted their daughters for economic gain. Part V uses the three-tiered reconceptualisation to arrive at a more complex understanding of the factors that lead to the gender-based violence of mothers prostituting their daughters. [Descriptors: Violence Against Women, International]