A/69/368 16. The citizenship and violence lens encourages the incorporation of women ’s experiences in shaping a State’s rights agenda and challenges the idea that women are passive victims of patriarchal systems. It rejects an understanding of human rights that centres on male power and female victimization and instead focuses on women as agents participating in the life of their community to actively challenge and transform patriarchal power dynamics. Participation and empowerment thus have a symbiotic relationship: encouraging active participation empowers women by challenging the view that women are passive victims, while empowerment promotes ongoing participation to continue to shape the way that citizenship rights are understood and protected in one’s community. It promotes citizens’ capacity to create egalitarian and inclusive relationships and institutions that further uphol d women’s citizenship rights. 17. For a long time, traditional human rights advocacy viewed gender-based violence through a public versus private lens, where States are responsible only for violence committed against women in the public sphere. This flawed understanding of gender-based violence ignores the reality that violence crosses the public and private domains and ranges from intimate and interpersonal violence to structural, systematic and institutional forms of violence. In more recent times, there has been greater acceptance that the State has a responsibility for violence occurring in the cultural, social or family life, as such violence does have an impact on the ability of women to exercise their full citizenship rights. It is argued that women a re full agents that are at once sexual, civil, political, economic, social and cultural beings, and that States must recognize women as such to guarantee their full and equal citizenship rights. Thus a more holistic examination of root causes, including potential economic and social remedies for rights violations, is necessary. 5 18. Violence violates women’s rights to equality and non-discrimination on the basis of their sex and gender and to liberty and security of the person, and the right not to be subjected to torture, cruel or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. It also impedes women’s right to equality within the family. The experience or threat of violence makes many women reluctant to leave their homes, which deprives them of their rights to take part in the political, economic, social and cultural life of their community. This in turn precludes women from exercising their right to vote and hold public office, to work, to education, to a secure livelihood and to access to justice and to health. 19. The right to life is broadly recognized in international law. 6 Despite this, the prevalence of violence against women resulting in death has grown to alarming proportions. Globally, up to 38 per cent of all murders of women are committed by intimate partners. 2 Reports suggest that in some countries, between 40 and 70 per cent of all female victims were killed by a former or current intimate partner. 7 Another threat is found in the violence that occurs in the context of armed conflict. During armed conflict, women are killed as strategic targets for the purpose of terrorizing civilian populations (A/61/122/Add.1, paras. 33 and 143). In addition, __________________ 5 6 7 6/21 Alice M. Miller, “Sexuality, violence against women, and human rights: women make demands and ladies get protection”, in Health and Human Rights, vol. 7, No. 2 (2004). Universal Declaration of Human Rights, art. 3; International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, art. 6. Lori Heise, and Claudia Garcia-Moreno, “Violence by intimate partners”, in World Report on Violence and Health (Etienne G. Krug et al., eds., 2002), World Health Organization. 14-60186