What the 2015 GBV Guidelines say

There was robust agreement by reviewers that women and girls should remain the principal focus of the revised Guidelines given females’ vulnerability to particular forms of violence and the need for specialized guidance to address that violence. In concordance with the global evidence base on violence against women, reviewers also agreed that the Guidelines should support actions to promote gender equality as central to the prevention of GBV.Footnote ¹¹ Inevitably, there were a few outliers.Footnote ¹² The Task Team deliberated carefully on recommendations that were inconsistent with the norm or represented particular flashpoints, including the definition of GBV and the extent to which the Guidelines should target men and boys and LGBTI populations as victims or as being at risk of GBV.

While all the Task Team members agreed that all survivors of sexual and other forms of violence in humanitarian settings should receive care and support, many understand the framing and approaches to violence against men and boys and LGBTI populations generally as necessarily different than for women and girls – not only because the drivers of the violence are different, but also because the socio-political and personal impacts of the violence are different. Several Task Team members worked together on an “Essential to Know” box in the introduction to the Guidelines that captures the rationale for the Guidelines' focus on women and girls:

In other words, the Guidelines – as with GBV work itself – recognize and respond to the particular relation that females have to a system of gender inequality that favours males over females. Violence against women and girls supports and affirms this structural discrimination. Sexual violence is but one manifestation;Footnote ¹⁴ intimate partner violence, child and forced marriage, and forced and/or coerced prostitution – along with multiple other forms of violence against women and girls – are each key sites of male domination that the revised GBV Guidelines target. Issues of class, ethnicity, religion, sexuality and other factors can compound for different women and girls to contribute to “situations of double or triple marginalization”.Footnote ¹⁵ The Guidelines recognize that it is both the nature and the scope of their gender-based disadvantage – still evident in every society in the world – that warrants specialized guidance and programming for women and girls. Yet, as discussed further below, attention to women and girls is still a challenge in many humanitarian settings, and attempts to shift from a focus on gender equality to gender inclusivity risk increasing, rather than decreasing, those challenges.

Ensuring attention to women and girls has been and continues to be hard-won

In Dolan's article, it is claimed that a focus on the male–female binary in gender equality programming is “anachronistic”,Footnote ¹⁶ and that the “pursuit of gender equality by way of GBV interventions has been at the cost of humanitarian principles”.Footnote ¹⁷ While these assertions appear to be linked, at least in part, to a loose reframing of “gender” (discussed further below) that has emerged particularly in queer theory, they are striking in their lack of recognition of the historic and ongoing struggle to hold duty bearers accountable to the problem of violence against women. They also overlook the responsibility of the humanitarian community to attend specifically to the rights and needs of women and girls; the importance of no longer deferring social justice for women and girls in humanitarian contexts; and the imperative to reduce violence against females and promote gender equality in order to achieve sustainable solutions to humanitarian crises.Footnote ¹⁸ In fact, these assertions echo thinking and approaches that required activists to mobilize in the first place to bring attention to violence against women in conflict zones. Decades of rubrics that broadly addressed “all people” or “all humanitarian crimes” resulted in no action on behalf of the specific rights and needs of women and girls.

Only by developing policies, standards and guidelines that targeted their particular concerns was attention paid to women and girls in humanitarian settings. In the wake of the Third World Conference on Women in Nairobi in 1985, the first working group on refugee women was convened to advocate for the needs of women affected by conflict. The working group's lobbying activities resulted in the 1989 appointment of a Senior Coordinator for Refugee Women to UNHCR. In 1990, UNHCR adopted a policy on refugee women's protection, from which evolved UNHCR's 1991 Guidelines on the Protection of Refugee Women. By highlighting the general protection needs of women affected by conflict (as distinct from men), the guidelines set the stage for standardizing programming that serves women and girls. Although the guidelines explicitly acknowledged exposure to sexual violence as a vulnerability of refugee women and called upon the humanitarian community to address this issue within its protection mandate, it took considerable time for the humanitarian community to support GBV programming for women and girls. A handful of individual GBV projects were funded in refugee and displaced population settings in the 1990s, but the global humanitarian GBV field did not begin to coalesce until the mid-2000s, and particularly after 2008, when the first coordination body for humanitarian response to GBV – the GBV Area of Responsibility – was established at the global level.Footnote ¹⁹

Relative to the almost total absence of female-focused humanitarian programming twenty-five years ago, there are now projects in a preponderance of emergency-affected settings that are explicitly directed to women and girls.Footnote ²⁰ This targeted attention is key to advancing women's and girls’ agency – a critical element of any efforts to address GBV. In fact, a global study undertaken recently found that autonomous feminist activism is the single most important factor in driving improvements in women's rights, underscoring the importance of organizing by and with women – separately – to support lasting solutions to women's and girl's exposure to GBV.Footnote ²¹ And this isn't done just for expediency; in the context of global patriarchy, women as a subjugated group should be leading their own emancipation.

Despite progress in attention and support to women and girls affected by emergencies, much remains to be done. For those to whom it now looks as if women and girls are hogging the spotlight of humanitarian response, it's worth taking a second glance. Women's voices, rights and needs are still often overlooked. In a telling example of the ongoing invisibility of female-specific concerns in humanitarian settings, women constituted only 13% of persons interviewed or spoken about in media in fifteen transitional and conflict countries in 2015.Footnote ²² GBV programming is one of the few areas within the humanitarian response structure where women's rights and needs are explicitly acknowledged and addressed, yet these programmes continue to be grossly under-resourced. In 2013, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) published a discussion paper for which it reviewed appeals for five emergencies – three flash appeals and two refugee response plans – and found that GBV programmes accounted for less than 1–2% of requested funding in each.Footnote ²³ In a 2015 follow-up report, the IRC found that the 2014 Humanitarian Response Plans (HRPs) for the Central African Republic, South Sudan and Iraq, for example, only fulfilled 5.2%, 20.9% and 5.5%, respectively, of what was requested for GBV programmes, representing minuscule percentages of the total HRP in each country.Footnote ²⁴ The same low level of investment appears to have befallen gender equality programming: the share of humanitarian funding allocated to programmes focusing primarily on, or contributing significantly to, gender equality fell from 22% in 2013 to 12% in 2014.Footnote ²⁵

This low level of funding is a marker of the persistent failure in humanitarian action to make a real difference in the well-being of women and girls. In the same 2015 report, the IRC goes on to describe lack of humanitarian leadership around attention to GBV as another major contributor to the humanitarian community's failure to adequately meet the needs of women and girl survivors and those at risk – basic programmes for survivors were wholly inadequate in all countries assessed. In another case example, Refugees International found that humanitarian response to Typhoon Haiyan, which struck the Philippines in 2013, “failed to fully incorporate gender and GBV dimensions into the early phases of the response, which affected each clusters’ ability to effectively assist its target population”.Footnote ²⁶

The response to Typhoon Haiyan illustrates that even when the problem of GBV is acknowledged, addressing GBV and gender inequality continues to be considered a “later stage” intervention by some humanitarian actors, too complex to forefront during emergency interventions. Dolan's article makes reference to this position when suggesting that addressing the foundations of GBV (e.g. gender-based discrimination and inequality) may not be relevant or possible “when people are in crisis”.Footnote ²⁷ The fact that priority actions to build respect for women's rights and agency, promote gender equality and reduce GBV are often postponed in humanitarian action as being low-priority reflects the too common reality that “‘[l]ater’ is a patriarchal time zone”Footnote ²⁸ in which delays serve to maintain the status quo.

A series of reports recently released by the Women's Refugee Commission relating to the refugee crisis across Europe tell the ongoing story of how many humanitarian actors on the ground do not perceive GBV to be a significant problem, and programmes are not in place to assist survivors. These reports illustrate how far we have to go until the rights and needs of women and girls are taken seriously enough to be fully integrated into humanitarian action.Footnote ²⁹ It would be entirely premature to dismantle women- and girl-centred GBV programming when the humanitarian system is not yet fully acting on its commitments and so many women and girls worldwide have yet to benefit.

Gender inclusivity represents a regression to male dominant language and practice

What Dolan's critique does underscore is how the language of gender is being reinterpreted, often with the effect of undermining a women's rights orientation in both gender equality and GBV prevention and response work. When arguing that gender and GBV framing should shift from an emphasis on gender equality to gender inclusivity, Dolan suggests this will “allow gender to recover its analytical, practical and political potential”.Footnote ³⁰ This subtly (and incorrectly) implies that gender – in theory, studies and programming – was at one time focused on “gender inclusivity” but is no longer because it has been co-opted by a discriminatory feminist project. In fact, the reverse is occurring. The language of gender has been central to women's rights activism and to work on violence against women as an articulation of the reality of women's subordination within the prevailing gender order. Now, however, gender is increasingly being used to talk of women's and men's roles, a shift that effectively masks the problems of male privilege and women's oppression.

Using the “gender” language was not intended to replace attention to women's experiences in this way. When many women's studies programmes in universities shifted to gender studies programmes in the 1990s, they did so not because they were no longer focusing on women's issues, but because they sought to clearly frame women's issues within a larger social, economic and political problem of patriarchy, such that their work could no longer be ignored or derided by male peers as irrelevant to the body politic. Now many of those same programmes are struggling against institutional pressure to focus on women and men equally because of the “gender” emphasis. Similarly, gender mainstreaming emerged from the 1985 Third World Conference on Women and was introduced as a strategy for working towards gender equality in the Beijing Platform for Action of the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women. Still fundamental to feminist activism, now gender mainstreaming is too often misunderstood to be addressing the socially and politically differentiated needs of men, women, boys and girls, without attending to the inequality underpinning these differentials. As such, gender mainstreaming's transformative agenda of challenging gender-based injustice and a direct focus on empowering women is increasingly obscured.Footnote ³¹

The ebb away from centring women and girls in gender and GBV isn't only reflected in the halls of academia and the sometimes complex theoretical discussions about our work. There are, every day, practical implications for humanitarian action. At the global level, for example, Iceland announced in October 2014 that it would co-host a UN conference on gender, including gender equality and violence against women, to which only males were invited.Footnote ³² In a summit on sexual violence in conflict held in London in 2014, one of the few non-governmental panels allowed above “The Fringe” – the room where activists and programmers showcased their work on display boards – was dedicated to sexual violence against males.Footnote ³³ UNHCR held a panel in December 2015 for the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence campaign in which three of the four panellists were male.Footnote ³⁴

Engaging men in conversations about violence against women, or showcasing the problem of sexual violence against men in conflict at a global conference, are not problematic actions in themselves – indeed, they are of critical importance. Rather, the issue is whether and how these conversations represent what some rights activists refer to as “phallic drift”Footnote ³⁵  – a tendency to revert towards a male point of view and attention to males, with the concomitant diminishment of feminist voices, approaches and attention to women's needs and experiences. In 2013, the US Institute for Peace held an international symposium on “Men, Peace and Security”. Whether it was the intent of the symposium or not, the implication of the title is a shift in focus from the Women, Peace and Security mandate to a focus on men; one of the objectives for the symposium was engaging men in peacebuilding and security, as if they are somehow excluded from it.Footnote ³⁶ In reality only 4% of signatories in thirty-one major peace processes between 1992 and 2011 were women; 2.4% of chief mediators, 3.7% of witnesses and 9% of negotiators were women.Footnote ³⁷ Similarly, the 2014 MenEngage global conference listed violence as one conference topic among seven others, under which violence against women was a subset; whereas the original purpose of “engaging men and boys” was to address men's violence against women and girls, much of the work of this community appears to be shifting to a men's movement focused around men's issues and perspectives, with a questionable degree of accountability to women.Footnote ³⁸

At the field level, particularly in many of the highly patriarchal settings in which much of the world's current conflicts are taking place, it can be a daily struggle to ensure attention to the problem of violence against women and girls, as described above. In the midst of these struggles, even some of the strongest women-targeted programming appears to be at risk. The IRC, for example, recently merged its Women's Protection and Empowerment Unit into a larger department that addresses protection concerns generally, despite calls from several donors and others to maintain a separate unit.

Gender experts have suggested that subsuming the problem of GBV within a broad protection frame can lead to “protectionist” thinking and approaches that may reinforce gender inequality.Footnote ³⁹ While Dolan hails UNHCR's adoption of its Age, Gender and Diversity Mainstreaming (AGDM) approach as “radical” and a “noteworthy example of an institutional effort to go beyond a focus on women and girls”,Footnote ⁴⁰ it might be argued that AGDM's generalist protection frame risks concealing, rather than advancing, the specific needs and rights of different populations, in this case those of women and girls.Footnote ⁴¹ In particular, asserting the value of an “inclusive” approach fails to recognize that females are routinely excluded from male spaces, and also devalues and undermines women's rights and access to their own spaces.

It is likely that attention to gender relations as a means of addressing the causes of violence against women and girls served to awaken interest in the problems of violence against males and against LGBTI populations generally – which many of us in the GBV community initially understood to be a positive outcome of our work, opening the door for others with appropriate expertise to address these issues through the development of an evidence base for their theory and programming. There is a lot of untapped opportunity for synergies between work that aims to address male violence and work that aims to prevent violence against women. That said, examination of the problem of violence against men or against LGBTI communities generally, however welcome, should not be at the expense of efforts to understand and address violence against women and girls.

We could hardly have foreseen the possibility that the language of gender would be appropriated and neutralized to such an extent as to underpin the argument that males and females are equally affected by “gender” issues and that men have been excluded from programming around gender.Footnote ⁴² Nor did those of us struggling to bring attention to the problem of GBV anticipate how shifts in the gender language would be used in attempts to reframe GBV work away from a focus on women and girls, as explored further below.

What the 2015 Guidelines say

What has been inaccurately characterized as a particular moment in history lives on: the agreed definition of GBV for the 2015 Guidelines is the same one that was included in the 2005 Guidelines. It emphasizes that violence is “based on socially ascribed (i.e. gender) differences between [emphasis added] males and females” and highlights that the term “GBV” is most commonly used “to underscore how systemic inequality between males and females – which exists in every society in the world – acts as a unifying and foundational characteristic of most forms of violence perpetrated against women and girls”.Footnote ⁴⁴

It is accurate, however, to suggest that the definition of GBV arose within the women's rights movement and that it is used to articulate women's exposure to violence in the context of patriarchy. In fact, without that movement we would not have the language of “GBV”. Whereas the 2005 Guidelines did not explicitly mention the provenance of the term, recommendations from several Task Team members led to the inclusion within the 2015 Guidelines of reference to the 1993 UN Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women (DEVAW), wherein GBV was first codified in an international declaration, and which defines 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”.Footnote ⁴⁵

The Guidelines also acknowledge that some actors use the term GBV to describe select forms of violence against men and boys – particularly select forms of sexual violence in conflict – as well as specific forms of violence against LGBTI groups broadly. There was tension among some Task Team members about including these points because of concerns that such definitional compromises could be exploited in order to draw attention away from the problem of violence against women and girls in GBV theory and practice.

In his article, Dolan captures these types of definitional compromises in the 2005 Guidelines when he identifies some inconsistencies around the framing of GBV. For example, the 2005 Guidelines primarily talk about women and girls as those affected by GBV, but they occasionally reference “women and children”, and they allow that “men and boys may be victims of gender-based violence, especially sexual violence”.Footnote ⁴⁶ This lack of precision in the framing of GBV has been a persistent problem. In one example from the field, the GBV coordination mechanism in Afghanistan added “men and boys” throughout GBV documents that use the DEVAW definition of violence.

While many of us working in the field have been clear within our own community that GBV speaks to the problem of violence against women and girls, we appreciate the need for all survivors of violence to receive services, and this may be one reason for inexactness in our language.Footnote ⁴⁷ Another is that we have responded to pressure to make minor adjustments in the interpretation of the term “GBV” in order to secure support from various constituencies – particularly those with a resistance to the project of equality between men and women. One colleague has described this tendency as a pragmatism that is necessary to gain sideways attention to women and girls in the male-dominated environments in which we work;Footnote ⁴⁸ she concludes, however, that efforts towards pragmatism can “trap us into validating the patriarchal perspective”.Footnote ⁴⁹

In any case, while concessions are still evident, the 2015 Guidelines are more explicit about how violence against males, as well as violence against LGBTI groups, is different from violence against women and girls.Footnote ⁵⁰ Several Task Team members articulated it this way during the Guidelines drafting process: examining and addressing the ways in which hegemonic masculinity can be used by some men (and, in rarer cases, some women) as a way to cause harm to some other men is in theory and in practice very different from examining and addressing the ways in which patriarchy leads to “the domination over and discrimination against women by men and to the prevention of the full advancement of women” (as articulated in DEVAW).Footnote ⁵¹

It's not a binary, it's a hierarchy

The accusation that the GBV field employs a “simplistic” male–female binary misses – or chooses to ignore – a key point that DEVAW underscores: it is not a binary, it is a hierarchy. In this way, there is a not an equivalence of violence for males and for females that can be captured in the same overall framing of violence, nor is there an equivalence in the case of trans- and homophobic violence against LGBTI populations. While there may be areas of intersectionality and commonality in some determinants, the drivers of violence, and the experiences and consequences of it, are different for each group in fundamental ways.

In broad terms – and in case this point has not already been made sufficiently – the theory and practice related to violence against women problematizes the issue of patriarchy, or men's and women's comparative place in the gender hierarchy. The fact of this subordination is universal, applying to the experience of all women and girls. The violence is more often perpetrated against females by men they know intimately, and it is likely to happen multiple times in different manifestations over a woman's lifespan. The violence men both experience and perpetrate against other men is not only more likely to be between strangers or acquaintances, but it is also not represented in a lifelong pattern of diverse and systematic forms and violence driven by the same foundational issue, and neither causes nor contributes to the subjugation of men as an entire – and defining – social category of people.Footnote ⁵²

Therefore, understanding and addressing male victimization tends to focus more on incident types rather than a gendered political economy of violence. To the extent that nascent theory does find commonality in some forms of violence against men that occur because the victims are men (rather than because the victims are poor, or of a particular race, religion, etc.), it often problematizes the issue of masculinity, or the negative effects on men related to largely heteronormative, male-determined and primarily male-enforced gender roles. Queer theory can also be said to problematize gender roles, but with a particular focus on how those roles restrict freedoms and rights around sexual orientation and gender identity. Concerns linked to gender roles and gender identity are different from those linked to gender discrimination, which the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) points out when it highlights that “lesbians and transgender women are at particular risk because of gender inequality and power relations with family and wider society”.Footnote ⁵³

All violence may be gendered, but not all violence is based on gender discrimination

Arguments such as Dolan's would have us understand that violence should be categorized as gender-based if the violence “is informed by gendered assumptions about masculinity and femininity”.Footnote ⁵⁴ It is worth asking how this categorization clarifies the experiences of different groups – in this case males, females, and LGBTI populations generally. Virtually every type of violence has a gendered component when we apply the term “GBV” to reference gender roles and norms related to masculinity and femininity. Dolan acknowledges this when he says that if, as his article advocates, “attention to sexual forms of GBV [against males and LGBTI groups] is extended to non-sexual forms, then this list will inevitably become somewhat lengthy”.Footnote ⁵⁵ In a preliminary aspirational brainstorm, Dolan's article includes sexual violence against men, purposeful emasculation, sex-selective massacres, violence against men and boys by landmines, abduction/military conscription, being forced to commit atrocities against others, and evictions from accommodations and denial of work for LGBTI individuals.Footnote ⁵⁶ An immediate reaction is to ask what forms of violence would not fit in this list. It is facetious to add: what about gang violence? Bar brawls? Any concept that is expected to cover so vast and diverse a list of instances of violence is simply unusable.

Taking one of the above types of male violence as an example, let us consider how sexual violence against men in conflict is framed by some as a problem of gender-based violence. This is probably the most common type of violence used when speaking of GBV against men and boys in humanitarian contexts. And indeed, this violence often has a “gendered” aspect, to the extent that it is strategically enacted in order to “emasculate” men – that is, deprive them of their “masculinity”. But the link between this type of violence against men and GBV against women and girls ends there. Men aren't being sexually assaulted in conflict situations as an expression and reinforcement of gender norms that understand all men as the lesser and exploitable sex; this violence against men is about men in positions of power relative to other men (determined in these cases not by gender, but rather by guns or other sources of control) seeking to consolidate their power by targeting specific groups of men, typically because of political, ethnic and/or religious affiliation. The GBV we reference in relation to women and girls is about them being targeted by men based on their subordination to men according to patriarchal rules, institutions and practices. Ironically, “emasculating” men would not be so successful if male domination over women weren't so universally accepted – restoring a sense of “masculinity” essentially means restoring men to a confident position of not being women.

Another example might be massacres in which boys and men are the ones targeted to be killed, tortured, sent to concentration camps, etc. This is a powerful example of the problems that occur for some men who are on the wrong end of the patriarchal system at a given moment in time. Men are responsible for the militarization and institutionalization of violence, and this type of violence is an outcome of that. Again, this is not about men being targeted because of broad-based discrimination against them for being men; it is about men in particular social groups being targeted in order for their opponents to win wars.

Dolan himself highlights just how different his frame for violence against men is from the established frame for violence against women. Protesting that the current conception of GBV “assumes that it is subordinate status in society that creates vulnerability to violence”, he suggests that the inverse can be true: men can be targeted for violence because they have a higher social status; men's assumed greater strength can make them more likely targets of military recruitment and abduction and sex-selective massacres; men's greater freedom to move makes them more vulnerable to landmines. Thus, men's power and control is a risk factor for the GBV that Dolan describes.

Rather than representing sound theory, it appears as if this is an opportunistic attempt to insert attention to men and boys under the GBV umbrella – and whether intentional or not, it is at the expense of women and girls. Dolan – and he no doubt has support for this analysis – concludes that GBV programmes fail to recognize that “men too can be rendered vulnerable by virtue of their gender”.Footnote ⁵⁷ It's not a failure in understanding. To articulate these concerns within the same theoretical frame of “GBV” is not only confusing, it threatens to reverse progress made in understanding and addressing the distinct determinants of violence against women and girls. According to former Special Rapporteur Rashida Manjoo,

In a move that appears to substantiate the concerns of women's rights activists that GBV work is being usurped and transformed by men in order to give heightened consideration to men's rights and needs, Dolan's critique avoids any specific discussion – or even acknowledgement – of how patriarchy informs violence against women and girls – unless one takes into account the assertion that “excluding” men and boys from GBV programming is itself a replication of the discrimination that women experience in the context of patriarchy.Footnote ⁵⁹ This line of reasoning suggests that a focus on gender equality for women and girls actually leads to gender inequality for men and boys. How could that be? The very definition of gender inequality understands women as a disadvantaged group in comparison to males.

One tenable argument for the need to “go beyond” a focus on women and girls in GBV programming might be that the system of patriarchy which causes violence against women no longer exists; thus we need to re-examine the framework. However, neither Dolan nor anyone else can make this argument. We have only to look at the data to understand that the patriarchal system is in full swing the world over.

What the 2015 Guidelines say

At the time the 2005 Guidelines were published, there were limited data available on the scope of sexual violence against women and girls in conflict-affected settings. Ten years later, the 2015 Guidelines include three pages of data from a total of twenty-one countries. The data come from a variety of sources, serving to round out a picture that the 2005 Guidelines was only beginning to draw. The problem of violence against women and girls is widespread in humanitarian emergencies – and it is not limited to, or even primarily, sexual violence. Intimate partner violence, trafficking for sexual exploitation and abuse, child and forced marriage, and female genital mutilation/cutting are likewise problems revealed in the data. The Guidelines also include data on sexual violence against men.

In prevalence studies where male/female comparisons can be drawn, the evidence confirms that women are at significantly higher risk for sexual violence by a non-partner (e.g., more than twice as likely in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC); almost twice as likely in Côte D'Ivoire), and that they may also be exposed to high levels of intimate partner sexual violence (e.g., 45% in the DRC; 24% in Côte D'Ivoire).Footnote ⁶⁵ Dolan concedes that the data “tend to confirm that overall more women than men are affected”Footnote ⁶⁶ by sexual violence – and not by small margins. Compound that with the multiple other forms of violence which women and girls experience not only in the context of humanitarian emergencies but throughout their lives, and you have a global health and human rights crisis.

And yet, the 2015 Guidelines attempt to make clear that this is not a numbers game when it comes to attending to the needs of survivors or undertaking prevention efforts. As with the 2005 Guidelines, the humanitarian community is advised in the current Guidelines to “assume GBV is occurring and threatening affected populations; treat it as a serious and life-threatening problem; and take actions based on sector recommendation in these Guidelines”.Footnote ⁶⁷ The 2015 Guidelines (as well as key tools such as the World Health Organization's Clinical Management of Rape Survivors protocols) also set standards for service providers that support interventions for any victim, regardless of sex, sexual orientation, ability, etc.

GBV programming focuses on women and girls, so that's what the data focus on

The problem is not that data misrepresent females as the primary victims of sexual violence: the data do not. Women and girls are indeed primary victims of this violence. Nor is there any question that the humanitarian community should not overlook the problem of sexual violence against males because they are a minority of victims. As the 2015 Guidelines underscore, no victim should go unassisted. The issue is that this type of argument distorts the way many in the GBV community use data.

Data – or conversations related to the data – have not been used in the Guidelines, or more broadly in the field, to argue for the exclusion of men. Instead, data have been used to bring attention to the particular problems of women and girls because that is what our focus is. When the GBV community talks about women and girls being “principally” or “disproportionately” affected by certain forms of violence, this is not to monopolize for them the benefit of care or to marginalize men. It is to do our job in bringing attention to the historically – and continuously – overlooked concern of violence against women and girls, and the social, structural and systemic dynamics of gender inequality that frame and make possible this violence.

Importantly as well, and as mentioned several times previously, GBV data confirm that the phenomenon of violence against females is different from the problem of violence against males. The data expose a global reality in which females are harmed by men repeatedly and in multiple ways because they are females, sexual subordinates in the gender relationship, with less power, less participation, less education, less livelihood, less money, less property, less recourse, less justice than males. This problem of gender inequality is often exacerbated in conflicts and can therefore heighten women's and girls’ risk. Thus, it is not about numeric majorities versus numeric minorities linked to specific types of violence that the data suggest; it's about the need for support, care and justice for half the world's population who experience a specific and debilitating social problem.