open Democracy News Analysis - audio - Comments

dia fnaish on "Rebuilding civil society in Sierra Leone"

dia fnaish — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 22:07:59 +0000

Hi there
My name is Dia Fnaish and I would like to share some information about the crimes against women. I came across this while researching statistics and thought it might be of interest.

The victimization of women is a special area of concern, and both the NCVS and the UCR contain data on gender as it relates to victimization. Statistics show that women are victimized less frequently than men in every major personal crime category other than rape,72 is The overall U.S. rate of violent victimization is about 25 per 1,000 males age 12 or older, and 18 per 1,000 female 73

When women become victims of violent crime, however, they are more likely than men to be injured (29% versus 22%, respectively).74 Moreover, a larger proportion of women than men make modifications in the way they live because of the threat of crime.75 Women, especially those living in cities, have become increasingly careful about where they travel and the time of day they leave their homes—particularly if they are unaccompanied—and in many settings are often wary
of unfamiliar males.

Date rape, familial incest, spousal abuse, stalking, and the exploitation of women through
social-order offenses such as prostitution and pornography are major issues facing American society
today. Testimony before Congress tagged domestic violence as the largest cause of injury to American women.76 Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop once identified violence against women by their partners as the number one health problem facing women in America.77 Findings from the National Violence Against Women Survey (NVAWS) reveal the following78:

■ Physical assault is widespread among American women. Fifty-two percent of surveyed
women said that they had been physically assaulted as a child or as an adult.
■ Approximately 1.9 million women are physically assaulted in the United States each year.
■ Eighteen percent of women experienced a completed or attempted rape at some time in their lives.
■ Of those reporting rape, 22% were under 12 years old, and 32% were between 12 and 17 years old when they were first raped.
■ Native American and Alaska Native women were most likely to report rape and physical assault, while Asian/Pacific Islander women were least likely to report such victimization. Hispanic women were less likely to report rape than non-Hispanic women.
■ Women report significantly more partner violence than men. Twenty-five percent of surveyed women, and only 8% of surveyed men, said they had been raped or physically assaulted by a current or former spouse, cohabiting partner, or date.
■ Violence against women is primarily partner violence. Seventy-six percent of the women who had been raped or physically assaulted since age 18 were assaulted by a current or former husband, cohabiting partner, or date, compared with 18% of the men.
■ Women are significantly more likely than men to be injured during an assault. Thirty-two percent of the women and 16% of the men who had been raped since age 18 were injured during their most recent rape; 39% of the women and 25% of the men who were physically assaulted since age 18 were injured during their most recent physical assault.
■ Eight percent of surveyed women and 2% of surveyed men said they had been stalked at some time in their lives. According to survey estimates, approximately 1 million women and
371,000 men are stalked annually in the United States.

Emilye on "Making development work for women"

Emilye — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 08:55:05 +0000

Depressingly, nothing could have more forcefully illustrated my point about the about lethal ease with which debates about equality can so quickly descend into single-minded efforts by a few men to prove their own victimhood. I was trying to make a call for greater solidarity between men and women, to advance our common concerns and progress towards a world of equality and justice for all people – men and women. I did not say, or I hope imply, that ‘all men are "violent ogres" or that women are always "innocent victims"’ – on the contrary, I feel very strongly that the resort to simplistic gender dichotomies is deeply problematic. Far from blaming men, I was praising the excellent work being done by men in many parts of the world to bring about greater equality, and exhorting the need for women and men to work together to challenge the structures of inequality and injustice that disadvantage us all.

So while I could respond by reeling off just some of the many horrific statistics from the hundreds upon hundreds of studies that point to the gender asymmetry of violence in terms of perpetrators and victims –which, by the way, is not only confined to acts of physical violence but is also structural and institutionalised – I think this would rather miss the point. Precisely what I didn’t want was to end up bogged down in a divisive ‘blame game’. As I said, merely counterposing women's and men's experience and perpetration of violence is not helpful; the challenge is rather to help illuminate the workings and functions of violence within the systems of oppression that organise our different societies. As such, my concern is not only with men’s violence against women (although I do believe that men should be held accountable for this violence where it occurs, just as women should be held accountable for any violence they commit). More fundamentally, however, my concern is with the violence that produces and is produced by a hierarchical gender order that is, itself, interwoven with other forms of inequality and oppression. So let’s try and get beyond this ‘men versus women’ stalemate we seem to be stuck in and start to bring all this back to the most important issues of social justice and social change.

eeh100 on "Empowering women in the middle east"

eeh100 — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 19:20:16 +0000

Elie Elhadj - London Is Muslims’ Treatment of Women Islamic? On March 11, 2002, fire struck a girls’ school in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. The religious police locked the schoolgirls inside the inferno rather than let them escape without their head-to-toe cloak. The firemen were prevented from entering the school for fear that the girls would be seen without their covering. Fourteen young girls were burned to death and dozens more were injured. Is this treatment Islamic? To answer this question, a comparison will be made between the fine treatment that the Prophet Muhammad reportedly accorded to His first wife Khadija and the treatment of women that evolved under Sharia (Islamic Law). We are told that the Prophet’s first wife was the best born in Quraish, a successful businesswoman and, too, the richest. We are also told that Khadija employed Muhammad in her business, that she proposed marriage to him when he was 25 years old, and that she was 15 years his senior and twice a widow. For the 25 years of the Prophet’s marriage to Khadija, until her death in 620, He remained monogamous to her, that she was the one person to whom He turned for advice, and that Khadija was the first convert to Islam. The difference between the Prophet’s treatment of Khadija and the treatment of women under Sharia Law is stark. The Quran subordinates women to men [see, for example, Verses 2:228 (Chapter 2, Verse 228], 4:34, and 18:46). It decrees that one man is equal to two women when bearing witness in a legal setting (2:282), that a male’s share in inheritance is equal to that of two females (4:11), that a man can have up to four wives simultaneously, on condition of equitable treatment (4:3), that a husband can divorce his wife without giving reason, though the Prophet is reported to have discouraged divorce. A wife can divorce her husband only after establishing good cause such as impotence, madness, or denial of her rights. Allowing the Muslim male to marry four wives simultaneously and divorce any one of them at will without giving cause is synonymous with unlimited polygamy. Additionally, Shii religious scholars interpret Verses 4:4 and 4:24 as if men are allowed a temporary marriage contract (when traveling, for example), called Mut’a, for which a payment to the woman is made by the man in return for her temporary companionship with no consequent obligations. Sunni Ulama sanction the Misyar marriage. Under Misyar the man is not responsible financially for the woman and the couple live apart; the woman relinquishes her right to housing and support money and accepts that the man visits her in her family house whenever he likes, day or night. Misyar has no date certain for divorce. Misyar has been sanctioned by the Mecca-based Islamic Jurisprudence Assembly on April 12, 2006. The Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia and the Grand Mufti of the Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo, Islam’s venerable thousand-year-old university, have both sanctioned Misyar too. Misyar and Mut’a marriages represent sanctioned adultery. Misyar and/or Mut’a permit couples desirous of an illicit affair to evade being charged with adultery, a serious charge punishable under Sharia Law by stoning to death [according to the Hadith (sayings attributed to the Prophet); but not the Quran, which specifies 100 lashes instead (24:2). The Prophetic Sunna (sayings and acts attributed to the Prophet) contains Traditions unflattering to Women as well. Sahih Al-Bukhari attributed to the Prophet saying that most of those who are in hell are women, that women’s “lack of intelligence” is the reason why a woman’s testimony in an Islamic court of law is equal to half that of the testimony of the Muslim male, and that the reason why Muslim women are prohibited from praying and fasting during menstruation is due to them being “deficient in religious belief.” Sunan Al-Nasai attributed to the Prophet saying: “People who entrust the management of their affairs to a woman will fail.” Sharia Law is not applied uniformly in Muslim countries. In extremist Saudi Arabia, Sharia means guardianship over and responsibility by the male in the family (father, brothers, husband) over the actions of the women in their charge. It also means strict segregation of the sexes at work, schools, hospitals, shops, public parks, elevators, etc. It means banning women from driving motorcars, traveling without the guardian’s written permission, and wearing a black cloak from head to toe to conceal not only their face and hair but also the side of their shoes. Al-Bukhari’s attributions became a common popular Saudi proverb: “women are light on brains and religion.” Saudi Sharia interpretations eliminate the potential political opposition of one half of the population to the government. By contrast, in Muslim non-Arab Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Turkey, Sharia Law is interpreted in such a way as to give women more rights, including becoming presidents and prime ministers. Is veiling and covering women from head to toe Islamic? Orthodox overzealous Ulama think so. Moderate Ulama disagree. The Quran demands modesty only (24:31). Similarly, the Quran has no specific demand to segregate the sexes. The contradictions between the Prophet’s fine treatment of His first wife Khadija and the way Sharia evolved on the treatment of women need to be reconciled. Harmonizing Sharia with the Prophet’s way of life (Sunna) is all the more important because the Prophet’s Sunna has been made by the Ulama of the tenth century equal to the Quran as a source of Sharia Law. A meaningful first step here was announced in June 2006. Turkey has formed a committee of thirty-five religious scholars to study the removal of all Hadith references attributed to the Prophet that encourage violence against women.

rudisafari on "A war that can be won"

rudisafari — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 07:47:42 +0000

After world War II, with the emergence of the United Nations Organization, new hope developed that a world free of any kind of violence, harassement will develop. That was only sixty years ago, at a time when racial segregation was a fact not only in South Africa, but also in the US, when in a lot of countries of the world woman had no rights whatsover. Unfortunately rights of women today continue to be tabu in quite many countries, which by beeing members of the United Nations, do not follow the spirit and the Letter of its Charter to provide all guarantees and protection for equal rights and freedoms to each of it citizens irrespective as to their gender, race, colour of skin etc.! I have to disagree strongly with the distinguished Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs John Holmes. His observation that the UN faces Limitations in what it can do represents a trend, existing for decades within the UN secretariat. Nobody has ever stopped the secretariat of the United Nations to disseminate information on the Work of the United Nations on its decisions, in particular on those noumerous acts( resolutions, decisions,plans for action, calls ob goevernment etc.) since the sixties of last centuries, aimed at drawing the attention of the respective governments, as well as of t public oppinion, to need to guarantee equal rights for women in every corner of the world. Indeed the UN Secretariat has not been stopped to establish a list of and name all governments which continue to deprive its citizens, women in particular,of its rights to equality and freedom as inscribed in the UN Charter, and various decisions of the UNGA, the ECOSOC,and other UN bodies etc. In growing number of societies in our world however, within countries which are members of the United Nations, the world and in particular the United Nations secretariat conitues to witness silently the selective application of the UN Charter and UNGA Resolutions and decisions, especially for ist female citizens, denying equal rights to women, which in effect gives a card blanche for an degrading and inhuman treatment of women, leading finally to unprocecuted harrasment and sexual violence in those states and societies against women. Those Countries and governments must be named! So that actions by member states of the United Nations can, and ideeded should be, envisaged. Nobody has stopped the UN Secretariat from doing that. It is indeed very sad to here from a High UN Official such a statement, it shows only that his personal capacities are limited for the job the world community, indeed human beings of this world devoted to enlightenment, are expecting him to do!