Ms Andrée Murphy:

Something occurs to me drawing on that question and also Deputy Smith's question around what is it that makes the change and what are the barriers to participation. If we have official processes that apply a gender lens, the difference that can make is ferocious. Where we see it most is when it has not happened. I will take the example of a scheme that is designed for the injured of the conflict at the moment. It is a great scheme. People who have been physically injured and who meet the criteria will receive a form of an acknowledgement payment and these are not inconsiderable sums. The way the guidelines have been written, however, means that the psychological and physical harms that are experienced are overwhelmingly people who are male and their experience of conflict, rather than women and, in particular, the experience of sexual violence. This is something that we really need to think about in terms of structural participation. If a woman has been in a relationship of any kind with one of the military actors, whether they were state or non-state, and if she was beaten or sexually abused during that time, that is seen as a private harm and is not eligible in this scheme. That woman is not believed and is not considered eligible in that scheme, so how is she considered an equal participant or an equal citizen within our post-conflict, transformative society? She is not. She has been doubly silenced by a structural policy that was put in place that never had a gender lens. It never did the work of examining how the big policy could be devised and have a gender lens applied to it to ensure effective participation and that the people who are most hidden are reached. There are great lessons in that for how we do the constitutional debate, because we need the macro policy. This needs to be led and resourced and people need to be tasked to do the work of identifying the structural barriers to participation. Are they within the community with actors who are preventing people genuinely meeting or speaking or is it something more structural? For example, how can a woman who knows nothing about trauma and is sitting in an inquest about her father being killed possibly contribute to a conversation about the constitutional future when she is barely putting one foot in front of the other at the minute because of these structural barriers? We can, but we really need to dig in to that and resource it.