We are a member of the Irish Consortium on Gender Based Violence (ICGBV), alongside Ireland’s leading international development organisations, which works collectively and with others in striving to eliminate gender based violence (GBV) in humanitarian and international development contexts.

We are proud to support and to be featured in the most recent publication from the Consortium, a policy brief on “Rural Women: Remoteness, Rights and Violence – Understanding GBV as a Barrier to Women and Girls’ Empowerment in Rural Contexts”. This document was written in response to this year’s Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) which focuses on ‘the empowerment of rural women and girls’. It is the first time Ireland has chaired the Commission and it presents an opportunity not only to help forge a more ambitious plan of action to support the empowerment of women and girls in rural contexts, but to do so with knowledge gained from a very broad range of experience in this area.

The brief, written in collaboration with Dr. Aisling Swaine, Assistant Professor of Gender and Security at the Department of Gender Studies explores GBV in relation to rural women’s overall inequality. It describes key approaches and learning for addressing GBV through empowerment programming in rural areas, through examples from the work of members of the ICGBV. It shows that the theme of this year’s CSW is fitting and timely as the rural context often puts women and girls at an increased risk of GBV.