A/HRC/14/22
specific as possible in terms of the services to be provided. For instance, instead of
recommending that victims of sexual violence have free or privileged access to medical and
psychological assistance, reparations programmes should spell out which treatment victims
of sexual violence need most. Rendering rehabilitation and reintegration meaningful to
women to ensure that they can recover a sense of normalcy or functional life is both a
gendered and a context-sensitive enterprise, as the notion of “psychosocial” rehabilitation
suggests.
57.
Reintegration and rehabilitation may also require adopting women-friendly forms of
distribution of services and creating opportunities that were previously denied to victims,
often on the grounds of sex, including through meaningful employment, education, skill
training, access to land titles and initiatives such as microcredit to motivate economic
entrepreneurship. Because the experience of conflict or political repression leads many
women to become publicly and politically active for the first time in their lives,
encouraging this agency, including by promoting women’s associations or political parties,
could also be a way of rehabilitating women in a way that does not return them exclusively
to their homes and family lives.
Symbolic recognition
58.
Symbolic reparation measures are designed as measures offering satisfaction that, by
giving victims due recognition, can also facilitate a process of moral and social
rehabilitation on an individual and collective level. Official apologies, commemorative
events, renaming of streets and public facilities, establishing remembrance days, building
monuments, museums and memorials may all help victims feel duly recognized.
59.
Who apologizes, what for, where and how can all be relevant considerations in
assessing whether women will get adequate symbolic redress. Given women’s
predisposition to focus on the pain of their loved ones, it would be interesting to devise
ways to duly recognize the individual dimension of such suffering and resilience. Personal
letters of apology can be the best way of recognizing women when accompanied by public
gestures of recognition. However, it is important not to forget that women and girls who
carry the stigma of their victimization, such as victims of sexual violence, might have much
to lose from public recognition of their victimization if they are named.
60.
An increasing number of countries have adopted a variety of traditional/religious or
community-based approaches for symbolic reparation and community reconciliation. They
typically include community-level ceremonies and processes that “reconcile” or “cleanse”
the perpetrator and victim and endeavour to restore collective harmony and rebuild broken
relationships. These proceedings also often include some form of redress that the
perpetrator agrees to give to the victim. However, there is a need to guard against
assumptions about the inherent value of such procedures as, despite often being more
accessible, they carry the risk of recreating the structures of control and prejudice that
women, girls and other exploited groups are struggling to eliminate.
61.
In addition to public apologies, public gestures of recognition often consist of
measures to mark the conflict, the violence or the notion of reconstruction that accompanies
a reparations and a reconstruction project. Such measures can be the shaping or reshaping
of public space, building of monuments and museums, the changing of street names and
other public spaces, etc. Little reflection has been given to exploring whether women are
duly recognized through such measures or whether they might prefer different forms of
representation and commemoration than those traditionally favoured by men.
16
GE.10-13109
Select target paragraph3
Connect to a paragraph
Connect to an entity
Disable highlights
Add to table of contents