7. The beginnings of AI's interest in VAW

Abstract

The present chapter examines the beginnings of AI’s interest in issues of violence against women, focusing on the period between 1989 and 2001. I first explore the international level (section 7.1) and then the Swiss and the German sections in section 7.2. This chapter thus highlights the changes concerning VAW in AI’s human rights policy and emphasizes the ways in which AI integrated the issue into its activities, while respecting the boundaries of its mandate. In so doing, the chapter stresses the importance of women strategizing at the international and the national levels for understanding AI’s growing interest in VAW. Further, it shows the disinterest with which parts of the movement approached the intensification of AI’s work on issues of VAW in the 1990s.