A/HRC/14/22 and the definition of benefits of both material and symbolic, individual and collective nature. (a) Gender violence and the definition of victims 42. According to the Basic Principles and Guidelines, “victims are persons who individually or collectively suffered harm, including physical or mental injury, emotional suffering, economic loss or substantial impairment of their fundamental rights, through acts or omissions that constitute gross violations of international human rights law, or serious violations of international humanitarian law. Where appropriate, and in accordance with domestic law, the term ‘victim’ also includes the immediate family or dependants of the direct victim and persons who have suffered harm in intervening to assist victims in distress or to prevent victimization … A person shall be considered a victim regardless of whether the perpetrator of the violation is identified, apprehended, prosecuted, or convicted and regardless of the familial relationship between the perpetrator and the victim”.11 43. In contexts of mass atrocity and multiple gross violations, the real challenge of reparations programmes is how to select the rights whose violation will trigger access to benefits and how to confine the circle of those who will qualify as beneficiaries. No programme to date has articulated the reasons to consider some violations worse than others, thus very rarely rendering reparations benefits to predominantly marginalized groups. The fairly limited but also traditionally conceived catalogue of violations of civil and political rights on which reparations programmes in the past have concentrated covers mostly those violations which are taken as paradigmatic expressions of political violence. Not surprisingly, these are the violations that in many scenarios target men disproportionately. Women have thus been excluded from reparations programmes, despite the terrible impact of violence on women, leaving them in a precarious position, with the responsibility for children and other dependants, without income-generating skills and subjected to stigma and poverty. 44. The current explicit inclusion of sexual violence in many reparations programmes is a victory against a tradition that minimizes its importance as collateral, private or nonpolitical damage. Nevertheless, the forms of sexual violence that are included are often limited in range and other forms of victimization with a disparate gender impact are also not included. Often excluded have been forms of reproductive violence (including forced abortions, sterilization or impregnations), domestic enslavement, forced “marital” unions, forced displacement, abduction and forced recruitment. Gross violations of social, economic and cultural rights have also been excluded, even when they result in the loss of health, life and death of culture, or when such violations are specifically related to systematic forms of discrimination, including based on sex, ethnicity or sexual orientation. Forced domestic labour, often taking the form of forced conscription or forced marriages, has also traditionally been left out. This tendency to include a narrow range of forms of sexual violence in such programmes runs the risk of sexualizing women, if it is not accompanied by a serious effort to encompass a broader notion of harm. 45. The inclusion of gross violations against women in the list of wrongdoings that will trigger reparations has to be underpinned by the notion that the same violations may entail different harms for men and women, but also for women and girls from cultural minorities. For instance, harms emanating from sexual violence — including the contraction of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, undesired pregnancies, complications due to often unsafe abortions, unwanted children, loss of reproductive capacity, fistulas and vaginal injuries, and multiple psychological disorders — are always compounded with social 11 GE.10-13109 General Assembly resolution 60/147. 13