A/HRC/17/26 39. Other environmental factors include “poverty, armed conflicts, all forms of injustice, family breakdown, political, social and economic instability and all types of migration.”10 Social and occupational stress and changes are also included as environmental factors in the societal model. These factors all create circumstances in which individual vulnerability to violence against women increases. 3. Consequences 40. It is undisputed that inequality and discrimination, including intersecting forms of discrimination, causes violence against women. Such violence cuts across gender, race, class, geographical location, religion or belief, educational attainment, ability and sexuality. Examples of inequality and discrimination can also be noted in patriarchy and ideologies of male supremacy and female subordination. Feminists have traditionally argued that in societies where there is more gender equity, less violence against women is found.11 But recent studies have reconsidered this point in light of research which documents high levels of violence against women in societies with greater parity in pay, access to Government and business participation, education and health care.12 41. Civil and political rights are critical for human rights to flourish, but they often disproportionately privilege some women, men, and groups who have access to resources, education, and various forms of social control. Less attention to economic, social, and cultural rights inhibits policymakers’ abilities to assess how differently positioned women within urban and rural contexts, racial and ethnic hierarchies, and within different socioeconomic groups are experiencing forms of discrimination as they intersect with violence against women. When insufficient attention is paid to different forms of structural violence it is easy to ignore the ways that various rights are privileged over other rights, and how this, in turn, negatively impacts women. 42. To date, theories about why violence happens have failed to provide a comprehensive understanding of how various forms of discrimination, beyond a male/female gender binary, contextualize, exacerbate, and correlate to high levels of violence in given societies. The lack of an intersectional approach can lead to the reinforcing of one form of discrimination in attempts to alleviate another. At the practical level, the norm is to use a silo approach of service delivery which addresses a narrowly defined set of issues, and operates alongside other institutions which deliver services to another narrowly defined issue. For example, domestic violence shelters in many countries do not have the capacity, or the trained staff, to assist women who have problems such as both substance misuse and violence in their lives. 43. The lack of recognition of intra-gender inequality and discrimination has led to the privileging of experiences of urban middle-class women, despite the importance of social location for women’s vulnerability to and experiences with violence. This leads to the experiences of all other women and also the impact of social location on women’s vulnerability to violence being obscured. The consequence is that programme designs and goals advanced in the interest of women may only reach the rights violations experienced by some women. More often than not, the women whose rights are protected are not the women whose social location renders them especially vulnerable to gender-based violence. 10 11 12 Committee on the Rights of the Child, general comment No. 5 Brown and Hendriks, 1998, p.126; David Levinson, Family Violence in Cross Cultural Perspective, Newbury Park, California, Sage, 1989. Maria Wiklund, Eva-Britt Malmgren-Olsson, Carita Bengs, and Ann Ohman “He messed me up”: Swedish adolescent girls’ experiences of gender-related partner violence and its consequences over time”, Violence Against Women, Vol. 16 No. 2 (2010), pp. 207-232. 11