İHD Policy Paper on the Prevention of Sexist, Repressive Behavior and Mobbing
21 June 2021
As human rights organizations that fight against violations, we are not free from such violations. We do recognize that the most important way to prevent violations is to turn the mirror to ourselves and, as a human rights organization, we now set out to identify and transform environments that enable violations.
İHD’s Central Women’s Committee has now completed its Policy Paper on the Prevention of Sexist, Repressive Behavior and Mobbing as a result of a five-month work. The policy paper puts forth a transformative and restorative policy based on the experiences and expectations of women+ in the committee. This policy, first and foremost, aims to feed its institutional culture’s equalitarian aspect open to transformation, to clarify what is not clear, to prevent violations, to provide for restoration when a violation is committed, and to materialize transformation to prevent recurrence.
While designing the policy paper, we started out by recognizing the fact that we needed more than an approach that limited the inquiry of a violation to a single board of the organization and set off on the retribution-acquittal binary. We, therefore, identified the steps that would help prevent violations. Moreover, we know that the first step of identifying problems is to define and name them. Thus we underlined the definitions we needed to know.
As an organization that has long been reporting harm sustained by people because of violations, we believe that the spirit of this policy needs to be restorative justice. The Restorative Justice Committee, which focuses on the empowerment of the aggrieved providing restoration, takes the following principles as its base:
- Unbiased listening
- Openness and transparency
- Participation
- Empowering perspective
- Impartiality
- Timely intervention
- Privacy/confidentiality
- Non-maleficence
- Independence
We, as an organization, assume the responsibility to materialize institutional transformation needed to prevent the recurrence of violations and to follow-up post-violation processes, and declare that we will allocate our resources, time, and labor to this end.
We, hereby, present our policy statement with the hopes that we all together will build a world with no violations.
Human Rights Association
Central Women’s Committee
For the full paper in Turkish click: İHD-Cinsiyetçi-ve-Baskıcı-Davranışların-Önlenmesine-Dair-Politika-Belgesi
*Infographic: https://twitter.com/IrisVanRooij/status/1250823031477460999/photo/1