POLICY FILE ON SEXUAL VIOLENCE

Policy File on Sexual Violence



Policy File on Sexual Violence

Introduction

This paper looks at how government matters in the development of policies against Sexual violence, a gender equality field outside the core European Union (EU) conditionality criteria. By analyzing the concrete workings and uses of government in Sexual violence policy-making in five Central and Eastern European countries, it identifies three mechanisms of Europeanization in the field and shows how together they work to expand the reach of the EU to this policy realm. The findings point toward an understanding of Europeanization based on social learning and dynamic, interactive processes of constructing what membership in the EU means in terms of Sexual violence policy processes.

Discussion

Policy debates in the European Union (EU) frame Sexual violence as a component of gender inequality (Kantola 2006) yet a major difference remains between gender inequality in economic fields and Sexual violence as a form of gender inequality. The EU has no strong competence with respect to Sexual violence (European Women's Lobby 2007; Kantola 2006; Kelly 2005). Policy responses to Sexual violence, while increasing in the last decade, remain restricted to soft law (Kantola 2006; Montoya 2008). In its soft law documents, the European Commission (Commission) explicitly uses the standards set by the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), the Beijing Platform for Action, and Council of government (CoE) documents, and encourages member states to do so as well.1 Whereas a specific policy response to Sexual violence is not a formal criteria for EU membership, since the late 1990s, responding to the issue has become part of the fundamental norms and beliefs that shape the collective identity of the EU.

Between 2003 and 2005, amid EU accession processes, Central and East European Countries (CEECs) witnessed major reforms in the realm of Sexual violence policy. Sexual violence was first mentioned on the official policy agenda of all five countries to be examined here in the mid-1990s mostly in response to the Beijing Platform for Action,2 but specific laws and policies on Sexual violence were absent until the mid-2000. Amidst widespread social mobilization orchestrated by women's groups, and upon the arrival of favorable governments, all of these countries adopted specific Sexual violence laws or strategies: Croatia adopted its Sexual violence law in 2003, Romania, Poland, and Bulgaria adopted theirs in 2005, and Hungary adopted a comprehensive Parliamentary Strategy on Prevention of Sexual Violence in 2003. The specific legislation and policies adopted in this period largely framed Sexual violence in gender-neutral human rights terms (Krizsan and Popa 2010).

While these changes were the outcome of a complex process of interaction between state and nonstate, national, international, and transnational actors (Krizsan and Popa 2007), the timing of reforms indicates that the influence of the EU cannot be disregarded. The remarkable simultaneity of policy reforms to address Sexual violence in Central and East government during the EU accession process indicates the potential impact of Europeanization. We argue that Europeanization has influenced Sexual violence policy ...