UNITED NATIONS -- On virtually every international issue, from peacemaking to sustainable development, policy-makers here have come to understand that narrow, sectorial approaches to problems cannot succeed in an interdependent world.
Instead, the trend is toward integrated, multi-disciplinary innovation which aims at cutting across the mental canyons that too often inhibit effective solutions to modern problems.
This approach was brought to bear on the international problem of family violence at a ground-breaking two-day symposium held last May at UNICEF House, the agency's headquarters.
Entitled "Strategies for Creating a Violence-Free Family," the symposium sought to bring together a group of some 40 experts from all over the world -- and from a diversity of professional disciplines -- to develop guidelines for an action plan that could help to provide concrete and global strategies for addressing family violence.
The result, according to participants and organizers, was a series of collective insights about the relationship of family violence to our global society as a whole -- insights that, it is hoped, will help stimulate a new degree of networking and cooperation among the various organizations and agencies that deal with the issue.
"This seminar has succeeded in bringing together a diverse group of professionals, activists and practitioners, all working together to help create healthy families," said Marjorie Thorpe, deputy director of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), which co-sponsored the symposium along with United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the Bahá'í International Community.
"The tools that you have identified for analyzing the manifestations of violence in the family, and for mobilizing constituencies around this agenda, these will help inform UNIFEM's own work in this area and, obviously, more generally will contribute to other attempts, globally and locally, to eradicate violence in the family and in society at large."
"Succeeding in eradicating violence in the family is not a matter of choice or chivalry or grace or good nature," Ms. Thorpe added. "It is in fact an obligation and a responsibility that has been imposed upon us by our humanity and by our interdependence."
Participants included representatives from more than 30 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) -- among them women's associations, children's advocates, and human rights and religious groups -- along with officials, consultants and specialists from UNICEF and UNIFEM. They came from some 17 countries.
Among the conclusions that were reached: