Women are advancing toward equality and claiming their right to participate in politics: as civil society activists, political party leaders, local councillors and mayors, parliamentarians, ministers and presidents. At the same time, women are facing a backlash to their political participation, and experiencing discrimination, harassment or assault because of it. This violence must stop. It is NOT the cost of politics, but by attempting to exclude or silence women, it costs us the benefits of the resilient and responsive democratic governance that an inclusive political space can create.
NDI has developed think10, a brand new safety planning tool for individual women in politics to use to review their personal and professional vulnerabilities and empower themselves to take informed steps to enhance their safety as they got about their political activities. The tool, which can be found at think10.demcloud.org, consists of a self-assessment questionnaire and their country’s risk calculation taken from NDI’s new Women’s Political Participation Risk Index (WPPRI). The WPPRI assesses the risk of being a politically active in 172 countries.
In 2016, NDI launched the #NotTheCost campaign, - a global call to action to raise awareness to stop violence against women in politics. The campaign’s title reflects the fact that many women are told that harassment, threats, psychological abuse (in person and online), physical and sexual assault are “the cost of doing politics.” For the last two years, NDI has been working to challenge this claim by raising awareness of the violence that politically-active women face, collecting data on it, and building capacity among our partners to mitigate its impact and hold perpetrators to account.
One of the key asks made by NDI’s Chairman, former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, at the launch of the campaign in 2016, was for the United Nations to begin to examine violence against women in politics in its annual thematic reports. In October, 2018, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, H.E. Dubravka Šimonović presented her thematic report on violence against women in politics to the 73rd Session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). This is the first report on the issue of violence against politically-active women to be tabled before the UNGA.
In June 2018, NDI submitted a paper detailing its understanding of the nature, causes and impact of violence against women in politics in response to the UN Special Rapporteur’s call for evidence. In it, the Institute responded to the Special Rapporteur’s request that the evidence be rights-based, action-oriented, and driven by the testimonies of women who are politically-active - as activists, voters, candidates, elected or appointed officials, and electoral workers. Below are both NDI’s submission to the UN Special Rapporteur, and her final report that was presented to the UNGA on October 5, 2018.