Protection has become a global buzzword and women are viewed as the ones most in need of it. Security Council Resolution (SCR) 1325 echoes this trend by stating that women are those most ‘adversely affected by armed conflict’. The 1325 agenda focuses on women in conflict zones as soldiers, peace builders and victims, but says less about violence in peaceful states. Yet, gendered violence, against both men and women, occurs everywhere. While the EU recognises that there is a need to do more to combat gender-based violence within its jurisdiction, the paper focuses on the discrepancy between the Union’s general commitment to 1325, and its limited efforts to combat gender-based violence within its borders. The discussion takes place against the backdrop of feminist philosophical engagements with men as protectors and women as victims. It posits that this binary is discernible within the Union’s emergent policies in this area. The piece rests on feminist IR’s discussion of the significance of thinking of violence as a personal story, begging for dialogue between the EU and civil society. The paper employs discourse analysis to identify the intertextual construction of EU policy on gendered violence across EU directives and other texts.
