A Feminist Response to the Arms Trade Treaty

The Arms Trade Treaty comes into force on the 24th of December, to general celebration on the part of feminists, who particularly welcome its clause on the restriction of arms sales where those arms may be used for gender based violence.

However, the following point, made by Campaign Against the Arms Trade, remains valid:

'The UK government, one of the most supportive of the treaty, approves licences which would be refused under any commonsense interpretation of the UK's current guidelines. Like the arms trade treaty, these latter include provisions on human rights'.

There is reason to be doubtful that the Arms Trade Treaty's clause on gender based violence will be any more effective than the existing provisions in UK legislation for restricting the sale of arms that will be used to violate human rights. And of course, the question remains of how any use of arms – deadly weapons designed to kill and maim – could fail to violate the human rights of those against whom they are used. In this light, it is in fact of little comfort to know that selling arms designed to kill and maim will become illegal where the killing and maiming may be inflicted upon someone because of their gender, rather than for any of the other reasons which could, apparently, be legitimate.

This is not to deny that it is, of course, imperative to 'disarm domestic violence', which is one of the most prevalent forms of gender based violence and certainly the form of armed violence of which women are at most risk, given the dramatically increased mortality rate of this kind of violence when armed. The women's network of IANSA, the International Action Network on Small Arms, campaigned for the Arms Trade Treaty, and more specifically for the gender based violence clause within it, for this reason. Yet it is not clear that the gender based violence clause would actually limit the armament of domestic violence at all: whilst it may require due diligence on the part of states – both exporters and importers – to ensure that arms are not diverted towards non-state actors such as death squads, militias, and gangs which commit gender based violence, it is not sufficiently clear whether 'diversion' (see article 11) will also refer to, say, a state police officer who takes his gun home from work with him, or a soldier, or some other man whose access to small arms in the name of the state is not necessarily restricted by the terms of the treaty. This permeability between the state and the home, the public and the private, the political and the personal, is all too familiar to feminists and it is, to say the least, disappointing that the Arms Trade Treaty should fail to acknowledge it, though also unsurprising given that the logical conclusion to the problem of wanting to disarm domestic violence is to prohibt the manufacture and sale of arms at all. This was never on the agenda with the Arms Trade Treaty of course, but how far from the agenda it was is illustrated by the representation of arms companies on the UK delegation to negotiate the treaty.

This leads us to the question of whether there is a conceiveable Arms Trade Treaty, short of the wholesale prohibition of arms manufacture and sale, which could be supported, even if not on pacifist grounds, then on the feminist grounds of being likely to significantly decrease the mortality rate of domestic violence. Given that, for the most part, domestic violence occurs illegally in the first place, the efficacy of legal treaties themselves is not to be assumed: the fact that something is illegal does not, by any stretch of the imagination, mean that it does not happen. The lack of a strong accountability mechanism in the Arms Trade Treaty gives particular pause on this count, pause which should carry over to consideration of any kind of treaty which might be pursued with a view to significantly decreasing the mortality rate of domestic violence, which would have to be some kind of arms trade treaty given what we know about the association between domestic violence mortality and small arms. The energy spent on such a legal approach to the problem should be weighed against the relative efficacy of, for example, cultural and educational campaigns targeting the glamorisation of small arms and those violent constructions of masculinity on which such glamorisation capitalises, as well as economic and social campaigns for women's independence such that they can be materially free from violent men. If a legal approach was in any case preferred, it would need to be one which explicitly demanded due diligence on the part of the state to ensure that the arms borne by its police, military, and other violent wings, could not travel home at the end of the working day, i.e. that they could only be used for state as opposed to domestic violence. Once phrased like this, it is not an appealing solution. It is even less so if we consider the danger of legitmising state violence in contrast to domestic violence, as CAAT, amongst others, fear the Arms Trade Treaty has legitimised the arms trade, though at least the arms trade does not have the head start of being defined as that which has the monopoly of legitimate violence in the first place, a definition which already requires we assume that violence can be legitimate.

To return to the Arms Trade Treaty as it stands, it falls short on both feminist and pacifist grounds, which in the final analysis are in fact the same grounds: while there is an arms trade, there will be armed domestic violence. Given that there is an arms trade however, there also remains a feminist imperative to limit the extent to which it can arm domestic violence, and feminists will understandably respond to this imperative from the position that the arms trade is not going anywhere for now, thus focusing on mitigating its specific harms to women. The balance which is needed is between mitigating those harms and legitimising other forms of violence or the idea that violence can be legitimate.