ABSTRACT
Gender is all the rage–rage meaning it is both a focus of attention and also anger. Human rights practitioners owe a debt of gratitude to development specialists who elaborated on the significance of gender as a category. For human rights purposes, the term gender can be linked to the intertwining of development with law and policy in the 1970s and specifically the UN Decade for Women from 1975–1985, which had as its goals equality, development and peace. While human rights treaties do not include gender as a protected category in their non-discrimination provisions, listing only sex, human rights treaty bodies have broadened the scope of their understanding of gender. The ‘family’ and its constitution has again become the site of the resistance in the ‘gender wars’.
