The GBV Observatory can play an important role in setting up a platform to collate all information
and data available from different agencies doing work on violence against women and gender-based
violence in general. Its scope could be as broad as presenting the international and national
instruments relevant to addressing barriers to women’s empowement to featuring tools and good
practices that human rights advocates can use as a platform to strengthen their gains and push
further towards gender equality and social inclusivity.
The framework below is a result of the study. Recalling that most data and information are collected
from point of entry into the formal (mainstream) legal process (such as filing a complaint, lodging a
case and upon access of service) – prompts asking direct service providers and agencies:
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•
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How sensitive is the existing mechanisms and support systems to the intersectionality of
women’s identities and contexts when they document their experience of gender-based
violence? how is this mirrored in the services open to and provided to diverse groups of
women?
How is the end point of case management conceptualized, and consequently, documented?
How can the process of women’s empowerment be documented, recognizing that legal
victory may not be the endpoint for many women?
Draft Framework for the CHR GBV Observatory (Parreño and Mesina, November 2018)
The focus is on documentation; the next, and ideally, the inveitable step is to harness the data
gathered in the process of service delivery to use for strategic ends: education and training, gender
mainstreaming, and promotion of gender and cultural sensitivity and social inclusion as institutional
values. Making available the data to a wider audience can facilitate this. It can also strengthen critical
thinking about women’s human rights and current actions to fulfill this. As noted by the study, the
dominance of law-based instruments in human rights discourse, and legal justice as the main vehicle
for justice in the context of gender-based violence, can be disempowering when service providers
Making Data Work for Women’s Human Rights
A Proposed Framework for the CHR Observatory on Gender-Based Violence
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