Defining gender violence as a violation of human rights is a relatively new approach to the problem. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the global feminist social movement worked to introduce this idea to the human rights community and by the early years of the 21st century, succeeded in establishing the right to protection from gender violence as a core dimension of women’s human rights. This is another example of the process described in Chapter 2, in which a social movement defines a problem and generates support from legal institutions and states. After describing how gender violence became a human rights violation articulated in formal documents of international law, this chapter discusses one of the most important new issues in the gender violence and human rights field, that of the trafficking of sex workers. In the early 1990s, a transnational movement coalesced around the idea that violence against women was a human rights violation. It built on the work of activists around the world who set up shelters, counseling centers, and batterer treatment programs, often borrowing from each other and adapting ideas from one context to another. Anti-rape movements began in Hong Kong and Fiji in the late 1980s and early 1990s, for example, and concern about rape in police custody galvanized activists in India in the mid-1980s. American activists developed anti-rape movements at the same time. The defense of women who killed their batterers also became a rallying cry in the US and in other parts of the world. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, feminist movements in Europe, the United States, Australia (Silard 1994), Argentina (Oller 1994), Brazil (Thomas 1994), India (Bush 1992), the Virgin Islands (Morrow 1994) and many other parts of the world developed strategies to protect women from violence in the home through shelters, support groups for victims, and criminalization of battering. The need for intervention was widely recognized in the nations of the global South as well as the North (eg., Ofei-Aboagye 1994). During this period, strategies, programs and information circulated globally. One of the most widespread approaches was embodied in the “power and control wheel,” a graphic representation of the theory that violence takes many forms such as intimidation, minimizing the significance of the violence, denying responsibility for the violence, isolating the victim, exercising male privilege, and using emotional forms of abuse (see Pence and Paymar 1983). The wheel was developed by the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project (D.A.I.P) in Duluth, Minnesota in the early 1980s and widely used in batterer's intervention programs such as the one I studied in Hilo and women’s support groups. It is used in many places around the world, including New Zealand, Germany, Scotland, Canada, Israel, St. Croix in the Virgin Islands, Fiji, and in the US in such culturally distinct locations as the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and Marine Corps bases. Information about programs and approaches are widely disseminated through the Internet. For example, in 1999/2000 a virtual working group under the auspices of UNIFEM conducted an email exchange about approaches to violence against women which included 2300 participants in 120 countries. After two decades of work at the national and local level, in the early 1990s some activists turned to a more global strategy, working through transnational NGOs and UN agencies. In fact, the campaign against violence against women is one of the few successful examples of a transnational collective action network, as women in various parts of the world tried out and adopted similar techniques (see Keck and Sikkink 1998). The emergence of a transnational movement against violence against women was facilitated by an extraordinary series of global conferences on women sponsored by the UN between 1975 and 1995. The first meeting, held in Mexico City in 1975, focused on equality, development, and peace. However, attention gradually shifted from peace to human rights, with a growing interest in defining violence against women as a human rights offense expressed in the 1980 Copenhagen and 1985 Nairobi meetings. It was not a major issue in the 1975 and 1980 global women’s conferences, although it was mentioned in the 1980 Copenhagen document (Thomas 1999: 244-5; Stephenson 1995). The Nairobi Forward-looking Strategies developed in 1985 identified reducing violence against women as a basic strategy for addressing the issue of peace (Report of Secretary General 1995: 125). In 1990, the UN’s Economic and Social Council adopted a resolution recommended by the Commission on the Status of Women stating that violence against women in the family and society derives from their unequal status in society and recommending that governments take immediate measures to establish appropriate penalties for violence against women as well as developing policies to prevent and control violence ag