Sara De Vido's book is positioned at the intersection of the literature on violence against women (VAW) and women's health. Indeed, her principal contribution is to bring these two fields into dialogue with each other. She does this by showing the extent to which illness and injury to women's health is a direct or indirect consequence of violence against women.
As befits its subject matter, the book is organised according to the Hippocratic paradigm. Following the introduction, chapter 1, the anamnesis or “case history”, is an exhaustive discussion of relevant human rights case law. This chapter is organised according to a “horizontal, interpersonal” dimension to address breaches of women's rights by other citizens, as well as according to a “vertical, state policies” dimension to address breaches of human rights by the state and failures of due diligence to prevent breaches by others. The chapter is almost twice as long as the next longest chapter and the reader may feel overwhelmed by the extent and severity of the range of harms perpetrated against women. The geographic coverage of the book is nearly universal, including the views of UN Human rights treaty bodies, regional human rights organisations (European Court of Human Rights, Inter-American Commission, and Court of Human Rights; African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights) and national courts. Nevertheless, the comprehensive summary of case law is one of two main contributions of the book.
The second major contribution of De Vido's book is its formulation of the concept of violence against women's health. Chapter 2, “the diagnosis”, makes the case for a reconceptualization of violence against women and women's right to health as better understood in conjunction with each other, rather than separately. Its focus on women's right to reproductive health is welcome as this most controversial aspect of women's health is key to women's lack of equality with men. In this context, De Vido draws useful parallels between how the concepts of consent and autonomy apply to both sexual assault and forced sterilisation (p. 153). There is also a discussion of intersectionality, most often the intersection of race/ethnicity and gender, that means Roma women in Europe are targeted for involuntary sterilisation, for example, or that a poor black woman in Brazil dies due to lack of medical treatment. While this may not yet have occurred in the case law, intersectionality could be extended to discrimination against lesbian couples who are denied access to reproductive technologies enabling safe conception, for example.
Chapter 3, “the treatment”, calls for a reconceptualization of state obligations to prevent violence against women and to enable women's right to health. It aims to revitalise the right to health which, despite being included as a “core obligation” by the Economic Social and Cultural Rights Committee, is rarely invoked by courts. De Vido's new formulation of violence against women's health includes obligations of result and of due diligence.
The Conclusion, or prognosis, examines international law's usefulness as a tool to promote women's health, as well as how international law is implicated in violence against women's health through the weakness of its monitoring mechanisms. De Vido regards international law as both cause and cure, reliant on social activists to reform it.
In short, the book is an extremely thorough and well referenced study that may prove useful to government practitioners, human rights lawyers, and advocacy organisations in addition to its primary audience of researchers and teachers of international human rights law.
