Violence against Women (VAW): Article 1 of the UN Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women, proclaimed by the UN General Assembly in its resolution 48/104 of 20 December 1993, defines the term “violence against women” as: “Any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in physical , sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women , including threats of such acts , coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life. Three contexts of violence are differentiated in Article 2: Family, community and state. The forms shall be understood to encompass, but not be limited to, the following:
a) Physical, sexual and psychological violence occurring in the family: wife-battering, sexual abuse of female children in the household, dowry-related violence, marital rape, and female genital mutilation and other traditional practices harmful to women, non-spousal violence and violence related to exploitation.
b) Physical, sexual and psychological violence occurring within the general community: rape, sexual abuse, sexual harassment and intimidation at work and education institutions, trafficking in women and forced prostitution.
c) Physical, sexual and psychological violence perpetrated or condoned by the State, wherever it occurs. [MIGS]
Voluntary Organisation: Groups and organizations that are formed to achieve personal or socially worthwhile goals (aside from monetary profit). [RSU]
WAD: Women and Development or WAD emerged from a critique of the modernization theory. The theoretical base of WAD is dependency theory and focuses on relationship between women and development process and examines the nature of integration. It is concerned with women’s productive role and assumes that once organizational structures become more equitable, women’s position would also improve. [DRWA, India]
Welfare: Government aid (in the form of services and money) to the poor. [RSU]
WID: WID subscribes to the assumptions of modernization theory. Its programmes generally stress western values and target individuals as the catalysts for social change. Modernization theory identifies traditional societies as male-dominated and authoritarian compared to modern societies which are democratic and egalitarian. It usually seeks to integrate women into development by making more resources available to women. However, these efforts led to increase in women’s work load, reinforced inequalities, and widened the gap between men and women. [DRWA, India]
WID: Women in Development (WID) is a development approach based on the assumption that women are ‘left out’ of development and need special projects to ‘integrate’ them. Gender relations and power inequalities are not addressed, and women’s participation is often passive. [Commonwealth Secretariat]
WID: (Women in Development) is an approach developed in the early 1970s as a reaction to women having been left out of the development process. WID evolved from a (primarily) North American liberal feminist framework and was also heavily influenced by the work of women researching development, such as Esther Boserup (Women’s Role in Economic Development, 1970). WID gave primacy to women’s productive roles and stressed the integration of women into the market economy, as it was based on the premise that women’s subordination was directly linked to their exclusion from the formal marketplace. Early WID approaches focused on “women in isolation” and took on mostly women-only projects and research, for example, regarding women’s economic contribution and women’s contribution to agricultural productivity. The most common incarnations of WID policy were the anti-poverty and the efficiency approaches, which viewed women’s participation in development as necessary only insofar as their participation in the market was required for the rapid economic growth sought by development agencies and international monetary institutions. [MIGS]
WID and GID: Women in Development (WID) and Gender in Development (GAD) are sometimes used interchangeably, but there are some basic differences. The WID approach was developed in the 1970s with the objective of designing actions and policies to integrate women fully into development. The GAD approach was developed in the 1980s with the objective of removing disparities in social, economic and political equality between women and men as a pre-condition for achieving people-centered development. Both approaches are still in use and are applicable in different ways. [World Bank]
Women’s Empowerment: The empowerment of women concerns women gaining power and control over their own lives. It involves awareness-raising, building self-confidence, expansion of choices, increased access to and control over resources and actions to transform the structures and institutions which reinforce and perpetuate gender discrimination and inequality. The process of empowerment is as important as the goal. Empowerment comes from within; women empower themselves. Inputs to promote the empowerment of women should facilitate women’s articulation of their needs and priorities and a more active role in promoting these interests and needs. Empowerment of women cannot be achieved in a vacuum; men must be brought along in the process of change. Empowerment should not be seen as a zero-sum game where gains for women automatically imply losses for men. Increasing women’s power in empowerment strategies does not refer to power over, or controlling forms of power, but rather to alternative forms of power: power to; power with and power from within which focus on utilizing individual and collective strengths to work towards common goals without coercion or domination. [UN WomenWatch]
Women’s Empowerment: The empowerment of women concerns women gaining power and control over their own lives. It involves awareness raising, building self-confidence, expansion of choices, increased access to and control over resources and actions to transform the structures and institutions which reinforce and perpetuate gender discrimination and inequality. [DANIDA]
Women’s Human Rights: The recognition that women’s rights are human rights and that women experience injustices solely because of their gender. [MIGS]
Women's Interests: Women have as wide a range of interests as any other social group. Women's interests often, but not always, include both gender and gender equality interests. [UNIFEM]
Women's Movements: This term describes the collectivity of women's organisations and their allies in a particular context. Women's civil society activism makes significant demands on their time and resources, and therefore in many contexts the proportion of women in civil society organisations can be low. While women's movements have at times acted with marked determination and shared purpose, the term 'women's movement' in the singular can also exaggerate the level of solidarity and cohesion within and between women's organisations. For this reason, the term 'women's movements' is used in this report to indicate the plurality of women's mobilizing.[UNIFEM]
Women’s Rights: Women’s rights are the rights of women and the girl child as inalienable, integral, and indivisible part of universal human rights. [DANIDA]
Women’s Studies: By focusing on the extent to which traditional questions, theories and analyses have failed to take gender into account, Women's Studies (as a field) adopts scholarly and critical perspective toward the experiences of women.
The objectives of Women's Studies include:
-Finding out about women by raising new questions and accepting women's perceptions and experiences as real and significant;
-Correcting misconceptions about women and identifying ways in which traditional methodologies may distort our knowledge;
-Theorizing about the place of women in society and appropriate strategies for change;
-Examining the diversity of women's experiences and the ways in which class, race, sexual orientation and other variables intersect with gender
Although studying women is its starting point, by uncovering the ways in which social and cultural assumptions and structures are shaped by gender, Women's Studies also studies men and the world around us. It is interdisciplinary, integrating insights from many different experiences and perspectives. Drawing from scholarly work within nearly every academic discipline as well as from the work of "grassroots" feminism, Women's Studies has its own distinctive, evolving theories and methodologies. [MIGS]
Work: An activity that produces something of economic value. [Triton]
Working Class: A social class of industrial societies broadly composed of people involved in manual occupation. The bulk of these jobs are unskilled, poorly paid and provide few benefits or job security. [RSU]
Zero Population Growth: Population stability achieved when each woman has no more than two children. [RSU]
