World’s Women Speak as One Against Abuse : Strategy: From Fiji to Israel, Uganda to the U.S., activists raise a new battle cry--treat violence against women as a violation of basic human rights.

The talk is about Fiji, but not the South Pacific island paradise of travelogues and the movies. “We call it Paradise Lost,” says Shamina Ali, coordinator of the Women’s Crisis Center in Suva, Fiji. She tells of wife beating, sexual assault and “bride price”--the customary payment a man makes to his future wife’s family, which leads to women being treated as little more than chattel.

The abuses are rooted in patriarchy and its underlying assumption of the subjugation of women, she says: “Patriarchy is very much alive . . . in Fiji, as it is everywhere else, I guess.”

Several hundred women--and a few men--heard Ali’s story at a public forum earlier this month at Stanford University. It was the final session of a 10-day international workshop designed to find ways to end violence against women.

Forty people, all of whom work at the grass-roots level to help abused women, came from Papua New Guinea, Argentina, El Salvador, Uganda, Israel, Brazil, South Africa, Cyprus, Taiwan, India, Canada, the Philippines, Thailand, Mexico and the United States.

Their stories cut across race, class, economics and religion. And the evidence they presented was overwhelming: Stories of rape, incest, wife battering, neglect of daughters, trafficking of girls into prostitution, political torture, abuses of refugees and the ravages of war.

“We didn’t expect to concentrate so much on issues of violence but the overwhelming response is that it is needed,” said Anne Firth Murray, forum chairwoman and president of the Global Fund for Women in Menlo Park, which sponsored the workshop. “No matter where you go among women around the world, there are two unifying themes--reproductive rights and violence against women. Women talk the same language on those issues.”

When they do, she said, they connect this violence and the state of the world: Violence within the home seems to be a microcosm of violence in society and military violence.

And it is in the international arena that these women, many of whom are victims of violence themselves, want to press a new strategy of identifying women’s rights as human rights, of treating domestic violence and sexual assault as human-rights violations.

“Very basic human rights include the right not to be killed or tortured,” said Sheila James Kuehl, a director of the Southern California Women’s Law Center in Los Angeles. “But this has been confined to a political sphere. No one sees it applied to women. It’s more nation against nation, tribe against tribe. But as long as we have got this (violence against women), we have got women as political prisoners.”

Some people wondered aloud what difference, other than semantic, the human rights designation might provide.

“It would make people aware of how serious the problem of violence against women is,” responded Charlotte Bunch, director of the Center for Global Issues and Women’s Leadership at Rutgers University. “Gender violence is the most pervasive and insidious human-rights abuse in the world today. We have to begin to assert that this is not a secondary problem that is dealt with sometime later down the road.”

Legally, she said, it would increase the type of remedies available, particularly for women seeking asylum in another country, who are fleeing situations such as forced marriage, abusive husbands or incest.

Both Kuehl and Gina Salinas, a Peruvian-born Canadian who works with immigrant and minority women in Ottawa, talked about identifying legal precedents and organizing support to amend their countries’ immigration laws, with “women at risk” qualifying for political asylum.

In the United States, Kuehl and others extended the principle to civil rights, calling domestic violence and sexual assault “hate crimes.”

One proposal called for pushing all countries to adopt the United Nations’ Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. So far, 104 countries have done so. The United States signed the agreement and it is to be considered this year by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The group also took a stand against what it said was the growing tendency to allow “cultural evidence” as a defense for abuse.

Nilda Rimonte, a Filipina who founded and manages the Center for the Pacific-Asian Family in Los Angeles, told of one 1988 case: A Hmong tribesman living in California, kidnaped and raped a Hmong woman in Fresno, claiming it was the custom--a form of courtship called “marriage by capture”--in his native Laos. The cultural defense resulted in a reduced plea of false imprisonment, a jail sentence of 120 days and a $1,000 fine.

“What is that saying to Asian women?” asked Rimonte. “We have no protection under the law? What if the Hmong man had raped a white woman? What then?”

Although they resent the use of such defenses, several people said they were uncomfortable criticizing cultures that are dominated or oppressed by other cultures.

“I am black first. My culture and anything else comes after,” said Alice Washington, who coordinates the Highland Hospital Sexual Assault Center in Oakland. “Our husbands and boyfriends may be perpetrators, but we are also concerned about what will happen to them in the racist (justice) system.”

Despite all the bad news, some women said they were inspired to fight back.

“I’m part of a process that has just begun”--telling women they don’t have to live with violence, said Sonti Maseko, who counsels battered women at a multiracial center in Johannesburg.

“As a black South African, our problems are so great we think nothing surpasses them,” she said. But she spent a week at a sexual assault program in Oakland, and heard others’ horror stories--about dowry burning in India, about some Arab women who were killed by relatives because they had lost their virginity, even though some had been raped.

Rather than being beaten down by these stories, she said, “I want to be part of a worldwide group,” working against such abuse. “In my country violence is institutionalized. Our so-called liberators have failed dismally to do anything about it. They are silent. They think it is not important. . . . Sexism is a form of human violation, dehumanization. We’ve been very silent about it.

“We have not just come here to complain and vent anger. We’ve come up with a lot of strategies.”

Maseko said all of the ideas stem from one given: “Men will (have to) understand that peace has to begin in their homes.”