5. The Reconfiguration of the Policy Field: How Opponents Appropriate VAW Policies

Debates on the Istanbul Convention also have consequences for the violence against women policy field. By analyzing newly adopted or amended violence against women policies and laws and their framing this chapter assesses how these changes mirror anti-Convention positions, how they reflect or neglect the spirit and letter of the Convention. Next to a formal policy analysis, we also analyze patterns of policy practice in the four countries including implementation, budgets and policy inclusion and the impact of the anti-gender discursive context on implementation practices. We find that while policy backsliding cannot be detected unequivocally through an analysis of formal policy changes it is much more manifest if looking at policy practices. Here, we find an increasing appropriation of the violence against women policy field including implementation, services and budgeting by actors without expertise in the field or who are outright hostile to policy objectives of the Istanbul Convention. This comes at the expense of marginalizing or excluding women’s rights organizations and their expertise that previously played central roles in combatting violence against women.