Private Pain/Public Peace: Women's Rights as Human Rights and Amnesty International's Report on Violence against Women
Author(s)
Youngs, Gillian
Abstract
This paper examines the 2001 report of Amnesty International (AI), titled Broken Bodies, Shattered Minds: Torture and Ill-Treatment of Women, in relation to women’s rights as human rights.The author undertakes a critical reading of the report in the context of long-standing feminist campaigning against violence against women. The author connectd the report’s findings to feminist efforts to politicize, and therefore make of public concern, all forms of oppression and cruelty toward women, whether this occurs in public or private (i.e., domestic or familial) settings. the authorargues that the report marks an important development in AI’s established strategy for campaigning against the practice of torture by integrating private as well as public forms of violence against women into the general or universal definition of torture.
