The violent corporation

Definition of gender-based violence

The pervasive issue of violence against women has been recognized as a consequence of power imbalances and the systemic privileging of men in social relations since the 1960s. Violence against women has been defined as any act resulting in, or likely to result in, physical, sexual, or psychological harm or suffering to women by the United Nations treaty body dedicated to the elimination of discrimination against Women (CEDAW Committee) in General Recommendation 19 of 1992. This includes threats, coercion, or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, occurring in both public and private life and taking gender-specific forms in nature and impact. Such violence is directed against a woman ‘because she is a woman', or it disproportionally affects women.

Invisible gender-based violence

In their book “Union by Law. Filipino American Labor Activists, Rights Radicalism, and Racial Capitalism”, George Lovell and Michael McCann write that in the United States, already before World War II, ‘most women … especially women of color, were subjected to arbitrary, coercive, often violent male rule’ both at home and at paid work outside the home ‘all authorized by the patriarchal and propertied differences embedded in official law’.

Despite such historical realities, gender-based violence has largely remained concealed, with public life traditionally viewed as male territory, while women were perceived to be unaffected by harm at home. These myths contributed, as noted by the CEDAW Committee in General Recommendation 35 of 2017, ‘to the explicit or implicit social acceptance of gender-based violence against women, often still considered a private matter’. While serious concern about domestic violence against women started in the mid-1990s culminating in Council of Europe’s Istanbul Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (2011), concern about gender-based violence against women in the public sphere, outside conflict situations, remained invisible much longer.

A poignant reflection of this issue is the limited attention given to gender-based violence against women in the United Nations (UN) Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (2011), to date still the most comprehensive framework for business and human rights issues. Despite the recognition of violence against women as a violation of women’s human rights and an impediment to the full enjoyment by women of all human rights in the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (1995), the Guiding Principles largely ignored such violence. Guiding Principle 7 reduces this structural phenomenon to gender-based and sexual violence in conflict situations.

Gender-based violence in corporations made visible

Fortunately, this perspective is shifting. Gender-based violence has been mainstreamed in the business and human rights discourse of various UN bodies. Notably, recognizing that public violence extends beyond conflict situations, the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights (2019) created comprehensive gender dimensions addressing gender-based violence against women. In so doing it is recognized that, gender-based violence against women ‘can result from acts or omissions of State or non-State actors, … including … operations of private corporations’ as expressed by CEDAW Committee.

Similarly, the report ‘strategic litigation for sexual and gender-based violence: Lessons learned’ (2021) by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights exposes sexual violence committed by employees of a Canadian mining company against at least eleven indigenous women in Guatemala, with the involvement of state authorities. The report explicitly acknowledges that corporate violence against women is not limited to conflict situations, as it is ‘still present during periods of democracy and relative political stability’.

Importantly, the report notes that not only ‘the bodies of individual women [were] violated, but also the collective territories of their communities’ with the intention to ‘force the women off the land’. Indeed gender-based violence against women is – also in the corporate sphere – a structural issue that hits those who suffer intersectional violence the hardest.

To date, much of the academic literature focuses on violence in specific sectors, be it floriculture, mining, semiconductors or sports. Famous is the work by anthropologists Farmer, Nizeye, Stulac and Keshavjee in the medical field. In their article ‘Structural violence and Clinical Medicine’, they noted that ‘the arrangements are structural because they are embedded in the political and economic organization of our social world; they are violent because they cause injury to people’. Such violence stems from ‘inequalities of power, material and symbolic resources, and life changes’. When we ‘connect the dots’, we see that there is a causal relationship between neoliberal globalisation and gender-based violence against women, as argued by True in her book ‘The Political Economy of Violence Against Women’. Corporate entities, in their unstoppable pursuit of capital, have violently subordinated women's bodies, positioning them as a thread entwined in the neoliberal tapestry. The severity of this violence varies, shaped by intersecting systems of power that compound people's disadvantages.

Moving forward

At the end of this analysis, it is clear that gender-based violence is not confined to private spheres or conflict zones but extends, amongst others, into the operations of businesses, shaping the lives of countless women globally.  By revealing the often-hidden impact of corporate practices on women, particularly those facing compounded discrimination, this contribution highlighted how direct and structural harm is perpetuated in our neoliberal world. Moving forward, recognizing gender-based violence against women as a human rights issue demands a shift in accountability frameworks, emphasizing the role of states to protect women’s rights and the role of corporations to respect these rights.