| This dissertation demonstrates the need for and the applications of international human rights law as a resource for helping eradicate violence against women. Violence against women, and domestic violence, in particular is a grave problem worldwide, yet one difficult to deal with because of cultural, social, and legal barriers that are institutionally grounded. I explore these barriers by analyzing their somewhat different origins and form in two different societies, Brasil and the United States. I then explore how violence against women has been engaged as an issue in the international human rights area. Finally, I explore the possibility, in Brasil and the United States, of bringing these human rights perspectives and tools to bear domestically, so that the energy, ideas, research connections, and resources that have come to the international human rights arena can be used to make a difference by making societies more able to see violence against women and respond to the situation. My analysis is based in part on my legal expertise, on ethnographic information I collected, as well as case studies, and cultural readings.; In addition to detailing with institutionalized barriers and constraints in each of the societies studied, I also explore the obstacles to collaboration and organization that have limited domestic grass-roots efforts at change, and I discuss ways they can be overcome. I compare the youthfulness of the movements, public misperceptions, resource constraints, differences in strategy and practice, lack of clarity and adequate enforcement mechanisms to promote social, economic, cultural and equal rights. Here too, I turn to a discussion of how the efforts of global women's movements and the United Nations have assisted and can assist efforts to change domestic laws and attitudes that continue, in both the U.S. and Brasil, to perpetuate violence against women. In this context, I analyze the significance of culture, history and the judicial treatment of violence against women and I examine how civil remedies may be approached by a combination of international law and grassroots organizing. I offer ways in which local groups can help participate in this process and how women activists and advocates can help victims in need of help now. By providing examples of how international human rights law is working to eradicate violence successfully throughout the world, this dissertation demonstrates how two societies as different as Brasil and the United States, have resources available, when connected to grassroots movements that can make for meaningful change in women's lives. |
