A/HRC/17/26 always already constituted through the social structural relations of multiple positionalities.”19 60. Understanding rights as universal should in no way result in an erasure of specifics and localities and should rather advance by re-engaging the local. The creation of false universalisms and cultural essentialisms can be avoided using a holistic approach and recognizing the diverse experiences of women’s oppression. 61. There is growing consensus that human rights are interdependent and indivisible and that it is necessary to embrace an indivisible rights framework to address interdependent and interlocking oppressions and discriminations. In addition, social, economic, and cultural life must be seen as the condition precedent to the meaningful exercise of civil and political life. This is possible through recognizing the connection between civil, political, economic, cultural and social rights, and also through challenging the hierarchy, which privileges civil and political rights. 62. Related to concerns about universality, interdependence and indivisibility is the perception of tensions among certain categories of rights, in particular those related to nondiscrimination and equality, on the one hand, and religious and cultural rights, on the other. Global experiences illustrate that religious and cultural practices are often used as justification for inequality, discrimination, acts of violence, and the ensuing competing rights claims that result in a violation of women’s human rights. 2. Violence on a continuum 63. Gender-based violence is an increasingly complex issue to tackle globally because of the fluidity of violence itself. Violence crosses public and private domains and ranges from intimate and interpersonal violence to structural, systematic, and institutional forms of violence. A holistic approach to understanding violence requires violence against women to be situated along a continuum in order to capture its varied forms and incarnations. 64. The broad categories of interpersonal and structural violence are neither mutually exclusive nor ranked. Rather, they anchor a continuum in which the site, scale, and actors involved determine where the violence is located. If any violence that falls somewhere on this continuum is either directed at women or experienced by a group that is overwhelmingly female, then the violence constitutes discrimination against women. 65. While ranking forms of abuse as moderate or severe is a useful categorization for service provision (i.e. clinical and psychosocial responses within the health sector; civil or criminal charges in the legal sector) the holistic perspective sees all forms of abuse qualitatively impacting the economic, social, cultural and political well-being of individuals, communities and States. Violence against women is not the root problem in most societies; violence against women occurs because other forms of discrimination are allowed to flourish. 66. Situating violence along a continuum allows for an appropriate contextualizing of violence in that the deprivation of water, food, and other human rights can be just as egregious and debilitating as family violence. Although these forms of violence are by no means the same, they can be viewed as parallel and similar when considering their interrelationship. Similarly, if a woman experiences violence in her home and is then denied security and protection by the legal system, she is encountering more than one form of violence. Hence, the response required to ensure that women’s lives are free of violence 19 Dana Collins, Sylvanna Falcón, Sharmila Lodhia, and Molly Talcott, “New Directions in Feminism and Human Rights,” International Feminist Journal of Politics, Vol. 12, Nos. 3-4, 2010, pp. 298-318, see p. 309. 15