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Over the past five years, DIIS researchers and Ethiopian colleagues from the Addis Ababa University have been researching norms and violence against women in Ethiopia under a project called GLOW (financed by the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs). With the project looking to end, we recently met in Ethiopia to discuss conclusions that will be presented in a book in 2025. Here follows some of the main points.
Lars Engberg-Pedersen & Adam Moe Fejerskov
Violence against women is widespread
Despite inconsistent and partial data there is little doubt that violence against women (VAW) constitutes an immense and likely growing problem in Ethiopia. Historically, Ethiopian governments have focused on so-called harmful practices, notably FGM (female genital mutilation) and early marriage, and there is little evidence that any of these practices are being weakened.
On the contrary, our case studies suggest that the practices thrive in different parts of the country despite the various development interventions seeking to instil new ideas. Legislation prohibiting the practices is only intermittently enforced, and religious leaders speaking against FGM are sometimes ridiculed. Indications are that the practices go underground or that local communities simply wait for interventions to stop before resuming them.
Other practices of VAW are, however, also important. Domestic violence is rampant, and the use of rape and other forms of sexual violence against women has been documented as a widespread practice during the civil war in Tigray 2020-2022. Online gender-based violence is yet another increasingly important problem fuelled, as it is in the Global North as well, by current masculinity conceptions and particularly groups of young men’s attempt to ‘recapture’ traditionalist patriarchal masculinities.
Overall, it seems that the conditions for VAW have not deteriorated. As all over the world, the Covid-19 pandemic produced a spike in domestic violence, and the civil war has normalized violent behaviour and reduced the public response to even grave cases of assault and violence, seemingly eroding the social fabric in many communities. Together with the new space for technology-facilitated gender-based violence, the outlook seems to be a consolidation, if not a strengthening, of the physical and psychological insecurity that Ethiopian women experience.
Numerous policies, but little commitment
In 2018, the current Prime Minister Abiy came to power on a wave of hope for change, nominated women for 50 percent of his cabinet, got a woman elected for the position as head of state, and placed women as chairpersons of the Supreme Court and of the National Election Board. Hopes were high, but subsequent initiatives have been few and far between. Today, the number of women in the government has gone down, and Abiy has belittled women’s suffering during the war. As the government’s existential struggles grew, Abiy seemingly limited de facto governmental power around himself, belittling others.
Since 2011 several policies have been elaborated to address VAW. At the Girl Summit in London in 2014 the Ethiopian government also promised to eradicate child marriage by 2025, but it took five years to develop the plan for how to do it and although it being a ‘costed roadmap’ specifying the activities and their costs, the government left it to donors to finance the vast majority of the budget. The same goes for other policies which, it appears, are not sufficiently important to be financed significantly by the government.
Since 2020, two big draft policies have been elaborated together with civil society organisations on gender equality and VAW, respectively. However, the policies have been stalled in the government machinery seemingly because it is too much to have two different policies related to gender.
Interventionism and social norms
International development organisations, for their part, have financed many projects seeking to convince communities that FGM and child marriages should be prevented. Despite the involvement of many different stakeholders the projects often end as activities limited in time and space where communities experience outsiders trying to change their way of living.
A growing focus among donors on the role of social norms have in many cases mean the design and implementation of interventions that are behaviourally focused and isolationist in their view to social change. As opposed to considering the wider structural forces shaping the potential for change – whether such pertain to legal frameworks or the material conditions of poverty – these social norm interventions are narrow in their mechanistic pursuit of collective behaviour change. Donors may very reasonably want to stop early marriage for girls to go to school, but the reaction from many communities have been along the lines of ‘education doesn’t matter when our daughters will have no opportunities for employment once they are done’, stressing the role of wider structural forces in shaping the outlook for change.
In some instances, donors have been adamant in pushing for changes that communities otherwise saw as extremely provocative and as breaking with their views and norms – leading to local resistance and a growing conscious around wanting to confront ‘western feminism’, a testament to the potential backlashes that lie in properly understanding and working with communities.
Conceptual and other challenges
The lack of political prioritization of the elimination of VAW – regardless of the many policies signalling strong government commitment – is evidently a key problem, but it is exacerbated by other characteristics of current efforts and of the Ethiopian state.
One thing is the state vanguardism characterising Ethiopian politics. Social and economic change is believed to be the prerogative of the state. Although the change of government to Prime Minister Abiy meant a formal goodbye to Marxist-influenced ideas, it did not challenge the role of the state in society.
The government is the exclusive actor initiating development in Ethiopia meaning that whenever the government does not act, overall little action is undertaken. There is no space for non-state actors to drive social change. The different women’s organisations seeking to support victims of VAW and to advocate strengthened initiatives for its eradication are perceived to be implementing agencies of state policies rather than societal actors whose initiatives should be supported by the state.
Another challenge concerns the already mentioned widespread understanding that communities are backward and should be changed. It is not only difficult to find local support for such views – and local support is decisive for long-term development results – they also fundamentally underestimate the meaning and importance of practices like child marriage and FGM to people in different parts of the country. This has to be taken seriously, and outsiders should understand the practices in their context – not only in relation to global norms condemning them.
This is linked to another issue, namely the lack of attention to role models and positive gender practices in local cultures and histories. Even gender studies at the University of Addis Ababa, as we will show in our upcoming book, tend to refer heavily to global gender equality norms while overlooking the potential embedded in local practices. Building on positive elements of one’s culture may hold more potential than referring to language and norms developed elsewhere.
Thus, one may question whether current approaches emphasising knowledge sharing, education and health services coupled with law enforcement are adequate to significantly reduce VAW. Broader socio-economic changes seem as important if the insecurity, subordination and violence against half of the population should be seriously addressed. And while global norms are important for their signalling and symbolic influence, it seems inadequate to expect that these easily translate into local contexts and induce change. Instead, we are better off with starting from the granularity of local norms and culture, and working to understand the dynamics of individual place and space – each situation offering a different engagement with norms – rather than seeking out mechanisms we believe are efficient in driving ‘global’ norms to the ‘local’.
DIIS Experts
Lars Engberg-Pedersen
Sustainable development and governance
Head of unit, Senior researcher
+45 3269 8695
lep@diis.dk
Adam Moe Fejerskov
Sustainable development and governance
Senior Researcher
+45 3269 8779
admo@diis.dk