Channel grantee partner the Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom (WILPF) launched a report on Oct. 20, 2016, Life at the Bottom of the Chain: Women in Artisanal Mines in DRC, which documents gender discrimination, slavery-like conditions, deterioration of reproductive heath, violence, forced displacement, and sexual exploitation experienced by women in (and because of) artisanal mines in the DRC. As Madeleine Rees makes clear in the Huffington Post, Gender analysis needs to inform a treaty regulating business activities: “Women are among the most impacted by the insalubrious and precarious conditions in artisanal mining sites. They are also the most impacted by the militarisation of the sites stemming from the use of private and security forces.” As she also explains, these kinds of abuses are exactly why a planned legally binding instrument on transnational corporations and other business enterprises needs to incorporate a strong gender lens throughout the drafting process.
