Are women's rights, human rights?

Hence there is only a limited practical and bona fide link between the types of sexual and reproductive atrocities committed against women, as women, and the international human rights law available to such victims to hold the perpetrators accountable or to seek surrogate protection.

It is glaringly obvious that if a society does not grant you rights, so that a state does not have to even deny them to prevent you from possessing them, then the fact that they are somewhat expressly guaranteed in international law, is useless.

The law must liberate itself from this "essentialist circularity." One way of achieving this might be to empower women to confront the state committing such human rights violations against them, through international and domestic forums coupled with the ability to directly challenge men in society who harm them.

It must be recognized in law that the violation of women sexually and reproductively is a "form of unequal treatment." The links between marriage, battery, sexual harassment, rape, prostitution and sexual humiliation in the home, at work, in pornography, in brothels and in the streets, must be made in order to fully grasp the unequal treatment of women by society and thus the law.

Cultural practices like aborting female fetuses, female infanticide and the deprivation of nutrition to girls and women, which guarantees that millions of girls are never even born or mature to become second class citizens, needs to be incorporated into the human rights discourse and instruments.

Further, rape in genocide must be understood to be what Andrea Dworkin coined as "gynocide;" the destruction of women as women, as a group or as members of the group.

Catharine MacKinnon urges that grounds like ethnicity and sex be joined so that crimes against humanity like suttee, FGM, honor killings and rape perpetrated in rape/death camps can be defined as what they really are: "destructive acts against women "in part" on ethnic grounds combined with sex."

Perhaps then, women will be granted legal avenues for prevention, recourse to and accountability for reproductive and sexual crimes committed against them. Perhaps then, when a woman is harmed reproductively or sexually, in war or in peace, humanity will be understood to have been violated.