New guidance document "Due Diligence, Social Audits and Gender-Based Violence and Harassment"

Gender-based violence is a widespread problem in the textile sector. However, gender-based violence is often not identified in social audits and is therefore difficult to measure. Making audits gender-sensitive can help uncover cases of gender-based violence in the supply chain – an important prerequisite for developing appropriate prevention and remediation measures in dialogue with stakeholders.

A new guidance document addresses the gender-sensitive design of social audits. It was created in a project by members of the Textiles Partnership and the International Association of Natural Textiles (IVN) as well as GOTS. Over the past months, the project partners have been working intensively on the challenges of identifying gender-based violence in social audits and how to better integrate gender-sensitive audits into due diligence processes.