News
Ending gender-based violence in a world of 8 billion
How a new term, reproductive violence, helps confront an old problem
UNITED NATIONS, New York (UNFPA) – Whether to have children or not is one of the most life-altering decisions a person can make.But as UNFPA’s 2022 State of World Population report shows, people around the world – especially women and members of marginalized groups – are frequently denied any choice in the matter, with partners, relatives, health care providers and even governments making or strongly influencing these decisions.
“Men have greater decision-making power [regarding contraception]. Women may have to act secretly/discreetly to get contraception services,” a man in India told report authors.
“Men hold the ultimate decision-making power. It is common practice for providers to ask for the husband’s consent,” a woman in Sudan said.
Though women’s reproductive decisions have been subject to interference for centuries, it’s only in the last decade that researchers have begun to recognize and explore this concept. They call it reproductive violence.
What does reproductive violence look like?
Reproductive violence includes any form of abuse, coercion, discrimination, exploitation or violence that compromises a person’s reproductive autonomy.
This form of gender-based violence can be committed by individuals such as partners, relatives and health care providers, or by entire communities, as social norms influence societies’ ideas of who should or should not be a parent. Meanwhile governments often exert this form of violence through laws and institutions, by preventing access to contraceptives or even conducting forced sterilization campaigns, for instance.
At the interpersonal level, reproductive violence might look like a partner hiding, destroying or even forcefully removing their partner’s birth control, or involve “stealthing” – the practice of removing a condom during sex without consent.
For others, reproductive violence follows the news of a pregnancy, with some women compelled against their will into motherhood and others, to terminate.It was the latter action that 58-year-old Jasbeer Kaur from Rajasthan, India, told UNFPA in 2020 that her husband’s family tried to force on her after learning Jasbeer was pregnant with triplets – all girls.
“No daughter had been born in my husband’s family in the last three generations. They told me, we won’t allow three daughters to be born in the house at the same time. They gave me an ultimatum: Get an abortion or leave,” Kaur said.
In demanding this of her, Kaur’s in-laws were perpetuating harmful social and gender norms that assign higher value to boys’ lives than those of girls. Members of Kaur’s community reinforced this discriminatory perspective, calling Kaur “poor thing” for not having any sons.
“Here, people still think … as a mother, you haven’t done your bit until you’ve given birth to a son,” one of Kaur’s neighbours told UNFPA.
But Kaur stood up to these norms and practices. She chose to leave her husband and his family and to keep her pregnancy. Today, her triplets Mandeep, Sandeep and Pardeep are all in their mid-twenties, building careers across the arts, business and health care.
“Today, people know us as Jasbeer Kaur’s daughters. We want to make something of our lives,” Sandeep said.
Seeing the problem to solve it
Although reproductive violence often involves partners and family members, as in Kaur’s case, they are not the only perpetrators. Governments and institutions also commit acts of reproductive violence through coercive laws and policies, some of which aim to control national-level fertility.
With the global population now eclipsing 8 billion people, countries’ population policies have entered the spotlight. And evidence has begun to emerge, especially, of countries seeking to boost fertility through problematic means, including by limiting access to abortion and cutting sex education from school.
UNFPA has warned that these efforts to engineer population size typically have little impact on fertility in the short term, and in the long term, risk causing major problems.
“Focusing on numbers alone treats people as commodities, stripping them of their rights and humanity,” UNFPA Executive Director Dr. Natalia Kanem said on 14 November in an op-ed for TIME. “We have too often seen leaders setting targets for population size or fertility rates, and the grievous human rights abuses that result.”
“Let’s be clear: When we talk about the ‘problem’ with fertility rates or an ‘ideal’ population size, we are really talking about controlling people’s bodies. We are talking about asserting power over their capacity for reproduction, whether by influence or by force, from policies where families are paid to have more children, to egregious violations like forced sterilization, often suffered by ethnic minorities, indigenous peoples, and people with disabilities.”
Today, many women are unable to exert control over their reproductive lives. UNFPA reports that across 64 countries, more than 8 per cent of women lack the power to decide on contraception, and nearly a quarter of women lack the power to say no to sex.
Specifically regarding reproductive violence, UNFPA is currently working on a technical paper and developing a measurement tool to help health care practitioners, researchers, institutions and governments identify where, when and how these violations occur. It’s a critical step towards helping societies address this issue and safeguard people’s rights and choices.
“A resilient world of 8 billion, a world that upholds individual rights and choices, offers infinite possibilities – possibilities for people, societies and our shared planet to thrive and prosper,” said Dr. Kanem.
[Prime Minister’s Media Division]
[Prime Minister’s Media Division]
… warn of dire consequences
A group of trade unions and civil society groups has requested President Anura Kumara Dissanayake to abandon his government’s controversial plan for the proposed tripartite management of the EPF.
The group has told the President: “We strongly object to the government’s plan to transfer the EPF to a tripartite board—jointly promoted by the Employers’ Federation of Ceylon (EFC), International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Labour Organisation (ILO)—and to increase the investments of those funds within private equity and debt markets.
“While the EFC and the government jointly project this plan as a ‘modern governance framework’, it poses a serious threat to the EPF’s financial stability, fiduciary conduct, and returns to workers’ life savings, with severe consequences for broader macroeconomic stability. Rather than replacing the corruption existing in the public sector, this tripartite framework paves the way for a corporate takeover of the EPF. Through this, the fund is exposed to unlawful business practices such as insider trading using internal information of EPF investments, conflicts of interest and corporate bailouts of unstable private companies.
“Sri Lanka’s corporate sector has a tremendously negative track record, which you alluded to during your victorious election campaign in 2024. This was recently unravelled by the multi-billion-dollar illicit capital flight through trade misinvoicing, which your administration is now actively working to curb in the imports sector.
“The recent banking sector fraud exceeds Rs. 13 billion; widespread corporate tax evasion destabilised the fiscal position (Sri Lanka Auditor General’s Department Annual Reports) and consequently inflated the tax burden on the general public. The EFC has found it convenient to remain silent about these crimes, possibly assuming that their silence would preserve their social standing. Considering this inherent corruption within Sri Lanka’s corporate sector and its disregard to the living standards of the general public, there is no realistic basis to integrate corporate interests to actively manage the EPF. The corporate sector of Sri Lanka has not developed sufficiently on technical and ethical grounds to safely entrust the largest retirement savings pool in the country. The EPF is a captive fund that has no mechanism for the owners to divest if the management is corrupt. This further increases the possibility of corporate fraud when the management of the fund is jointly held with the corporate sector.
“Furthermore, during the recent public discussion with trade unions, Deputy Minister of Finance Dr. Anila Jayantha pointed out that the domestic debt restructuring (DDR) would inflict a loss of Rs. 600 billion to the EPF. Our independent calculations—formally submitted as an affidavit to the Supreme Court approved by the Federation of University Teachers’ Associations in 2024—reveal that nominal loss alone is Rs. 634.4 billion. When factoring in foreclosed reinvestment returns, the true loss skyrockets to Rs. 1,711 billion, wiping out 48% of the fund’s projected gross income for the 2023 – 2028 period. Under the pretext of safeguarding the banking system, this colossal robbery preserved high yields on government bonds held by commercial banks and high-net-worth individuals, subsequently reaping them astronomical profits. Now, the exact same plunder is rearing its head again disguised as a tripartite committee.”
“The main arguments supporting our resistance and viable alternatives for optimising EPF management directly under the Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL), are outlined below.
“Objections to the government’s tripartite proposal:
1. The “International best practice and conflict of interest fallacies”
The government holds that tripartite management of pension funds is the “international best practice” and that there is a “conflict of interest” in CBSL managing the EPF. They are key pillars justifying government’s tripartite proposal.
These two positions are shockingly misleading given that four of the five largest pension funds in the world, in Norway, Japan, the U.S., and Singapore, are managed directly by state bodies or central banks. Therefore, ‘international best practice’ in pension fund management is the exact opposite of what the government and the IMF are proposing. We hence reject these baseless positions.
2. Corporate captivity and bailouts
It is clear that the EFC is desperately pushing for this proposal at a time of global uncertainty, to cushion the effects of the crisis and maximise gains. Under corporate influence within the proposed tripartite board, the private conglomerates can use the multi-trillion-rupee EPF to continue their unstable commercial operations without having to risk their own capital or savings to do so. This will severely erode the financial stability of the EPF and its returns.
3. Risk of front running
“Because the EPF is a colossal fund, its investment decisions can alter asset prices. This creates immense monetary value for the information generated by its investment decisions. Corporate representatives on the proposed tripartite board will be perfectly positioned to use this information to trade ahead of the EPF (front-running), buying assets cheaply and dumping them onto the EPF at inflated prices for guaranteed corporate gain, resulting in a reduction of returns to the EPF.
4. Unavoidable loopholes
“Presence of a separate group of investment analysts, trade union representatives and government officials within the proposed tripartite structure cannot prevent pre-market corporate access to EPF’s investment decisions. Investment proposals made by the analysts has to be first approved by the proposed tripartite committee, making it impossible to prevent corporate access to insider information on EPF investments.”
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