Fostering Women Political Participation through Parliamentary Support aimed at the prevention of electoral violence

Globally, women participation in politics has increased, largely thanks to quotas, plateaued at around 25%, and there’s a genuine concern it will start decreasing because of powerful deterrents and disenfranchisers like tech-facilitated violence and harassment, but also political violence.

Despite several good examples of political parties and parliaments increasing quotas for women, such as women parliamentary networks pushing through legislative packages to prevent domestic violence and similar, the most recent concerning tendency seems to be women considering quitting politics[1]. Hence, the IPU during its 148^th Assembly organized a panel on the topic: “Women in politics: To stay or not to stay?” that reaffirmed the different types of pressure, intimidation and harassment women had to undergo in order to stay in politics and calling for a peer-to-peer support for building resilience among politicians, ensuring better representation of women and adopting codes of conduct.

According to IPU research, it is women that seem to be most affected with political violence throughout the electoral cycle. Both political parties and parliamentary institutions have a major role to play. Furthermore, rapid digital development, and unregulated hate speech seems to have proliferated online gender-based violence.  We see that public participation in decision-making, legislative inputs and raising digital literacy would need to be strengthened. Measures, monitoring, analysis, accountability, and legislative framework need to be in place.

Internal parliamentary policies and procedures prohibiting gender-based violence, as well as competent and independent grievance mechanisms are but a minimum.  It is essential to actively involve men to increase their awareness of the scale of the problem^[2].

The following activities may be considered:

1. Training for Political Parties, support on developing codes of ethics, guidelines, measures to secure protection of their women members and similar.
2. Women Parliamentary Networks: support to new and/or existing networks, organize conferences with local assembly MPs. SDG caucuses may also serve as a good base.
3. Civil Society active involvement
4. Developing platforms for dialogue and development of measures: peer-to-peer support for building resilience and solidarity among politicians, ensuring better representation of women and adopting codes of conduct. Work on actively engaging women parliamentary networks in working groups on developing legislative framework on AI and regulating digital platforms, hate speech and online violence.
5. Foster a multidimensional approach: from the global, regional, national to the local level
6. Consider creating and supporting women peacebuilders within transitional justice programmes.
7. Expertise and consultations on developing internal parliamentary policies and procedures prohibiting gender-based violence, as well as competent and independent grievance mechanisms.

Women Parliamentary Networks may be the first point of reference in parliaments but also cross-party caucuses on SDGs for example. Clearly, working with women parliamentarians need to be done in an inclusive manner, through an all-party approach. Women parliamentarians proved to be most engaged and often drivers of change including in post-conflict contexts hence their potential for peacebuilding and contribution to transitional justice. Support in terms of seeking approaches to curb violence against women in politics is a commonly received request from parliamentarians.

If we look at the social media in particular Facebook, X, Instagram etc., women parliamentarians are reporting inappropriate comments and images against them, with as many as 58.2 % highlighting that they had seen images or comments about them which were disparaging or had a sexual connotation and 66.7 % cases included abusive, sexual or violent content. Technological achievement now allows for such content to spread swiftly and can be reproduced and remain visible for indefinite time. There is also abuse of freedom of expression to justify hate speech and stifle women’s freedom of expression[3].

Finaly, online gender-based violence sets a culture of violence where it may be seen as normal and inevitable. In the absence of regulations, it seems to be tolerated and almost inevitable[4].

[1] 148^th IPU Forum of Women Parliamentarians https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NW8tfevKWj4

[2] https://www.ipu.org/news/news-in-brief/2022-11/violence-against-women-parliamentarians-causes-effects-solutions-0

[3] IPU 2018, Sexism, Harassment and Violence against Women in Parliaments in Europe

[4] Becky Faith 2024, Tackling Online Gender-Based Violence: Understanding Gender, Development and the Power Relations of Digital Spaces.