Structural Violence: A Barrier to Achieving the Millennium Development Goals for Women

Abstract

In 2000, all 191 United Nations member states agreed to work toward the achievement of a set of health and development goals by 2015. The achievement of these eight goals, the Millennium Development goals (MDGs) is highly dependent on improving the status of women, who play a key role in health and education in families and communities around the world. Yet structural violence, defined as the systematic exclusion of a group from the resources needed to develop their full human potential, remains a significant barrier against women's development and threatens the achievement of the MDGs. Although sound evidence has long existed for improving women's survival, the will to address women's health concretely and holistically is only recently gaining the advocacy needed to change policy. Concrete examples of the integration of approaches to mitigate structural violence within the delivery of health services do exist and should be incorporated into global advocacy for women's health.

Humanizing Big Numbers: Representational Strategies in Institutional Films about Global Maternal Mortality

“…Their initiation was celebrated for incorporating structural inequality into classic international development campaigns, even as scholars and development workers expressed skepticism about the campaign's efficacy and lack of holistic implementation (Mukherjee et al. ).…”

“…MDG inaugurated a series of development campaigns framed as humanitarianism that linked traditional global development targets such as income poverty, hunger, and infectious disease to more justice-oriented campaigns promoting education, environmental sustainability, and gender equity. Their initiation was celebrated for incorporating structural inequality into classic international development campaigns, even as scholars and development workers expressed skepticism about the campaign's efficacy and lack of holistic implementation (Mukherjee et al 2011).…”

“…Ultimately, such reliance on the weight of visually absent, yet symbolically present, dead maternal bodies results in representations of structural violence that leave the viewer a distant witnessing spectator. This focus on the human figures of global statistics ultimately calls attention to the relationship between expectations of particular kinds of humanitarian witnessing (notably those reliant on universal maternal humanism) and long-standing (and unresolved) critiques that the MDG campaign's interventions were top-down and audit focused rather than accounting for the specificity of context (Mukherjee et al 2011). This is a more generalizable challenge for efforts to bridge the scale between individual cases and global accountings.…”

Sobre o parto e o nascer: a importância da prevenção quaternária

“…Generally associated with a moment of renewal, becoming a mother is sometimes associated with risk to the lives of woman and child. The risk to the woman can be greater or lesser depending on the extent to which women are supported or oppressed in the society and is a concrete expression of gender inequalities and structural violence against women 1 . In other words, maternal mortality indicates the degree to which the society is developed.…”

Avaliação de um programa pré-natal de educação em saúde (PRENACEL) na redução das lesões do períneo: um ensaio aleatorizado por conglomerados

“…1,2 Os riscos associados à experiência de se tornar mãe são, em grande parte, determinados pelo grau de suporte ou opressão a que as mulheres estão sujeitas na sociedade. 3,4 A mortalidade materna indica o grau de desenvolvimento da sociedade, as condições de vida das mulheres e o desempenho dos sistemas de saúde, dependendo assim, da conjuntura social, econômica e cultural de cada país. 3,5,6 Estas mortes são consideradas violação de direitos humanos, pois ocorrem principalmente entre as mulheres mais vulneráveis, sendo muitas vezes evitáveis na presença de cuidado precoce e apropriado.…”