Women's Rights Employment Law Blog: Punished for Being Female: The Permanent World War

Acts of domestic violence occur every 12 seconds in the U.S. – making it the leading cause of injury to women between the ages of 15 and 44 in the country – more than car accidents, muggings and rapes combined. More than 4,500 women are killed each year in the U.S. by abusive husbands or boyfriends.

And if this is the state of affairs in the United States--that elusive land of freedom for all--then what is the global situation in general? Bob Herbert has an excellent op-ed piece in New York Times today.

Punished for Being Female
By BOB HERBERT, Op-Ed Columnist

November 2, 2006

Bride burnings, honor killings, female infanticide, sex
trafficking, mass rape as a weapon of war and many other
hideous forms of violence against women are documented in a
report released last month by the United Nations.

The report, a compilation of many studies from around the
world, should have been seen as the latest dispatch from
that permanent world war - the war against women all over
the planet. Instead, the news media greeted its shocking
contents with a collective yawn.

The war analogy is not an overstatement. In many parts of
the world, men beat, torture, rape and kill women with
impunity. In Ciudad JuÃ¡rez, a Mexican city on the Texas
border, 300 to 400 women have been murdered over the past
several years. Many were raped and mutilated. The widespread
belief that punishment for these crimes was unlikely was a
'key factor' in their occurrence, the report said.

Each year thousands of wives in India are murdered and
maimed - many of them doused with kerosene and set ablaze -
by husbands dissatisfied by the size of their dowries or
angry about their wives' behavior. In Ethiopia, the
abduction and rape of young girls is a commonplace way to
obtain a bride. In many instances the parents agree to the
marriage, believing that the raped child is no longer fit to
marry anyone else.

In Pakistan, a woman cannot legally prove that she was raped
unless four 'virtuous' Muslim men testify that they
witnessed the attack. Without those four witnesses, the
woman herself is vulnerable to prosecution for fornication
or adultery.

While it's undoubtedly true that men maim and kill other men
in astonishing numbers, what I'm talking about here is the
way that women, by the millions, are systematically targeted
for attack because they are women.

In some cases the sexual violence comes in vast, sickening waves. Just think, for example, of Darfur, Congo, Sudan and the former Yugoslavia. As the report noted, 'The incidence of violence against women in armed conflict, particularly sexual violence, including rape, has been increasingly acknowledged and documented.'
More than 130 million girls and women are living with the
consequences of genital mutilation, and many others have
died from this barbaric practice. Jessica Neuwirth, the
president of Equality Now, an international women's rights
organization, said, 'Everyone who's been cut knows someone
who died from the cutting. They die from bleeding, or later
from infection, or sometime later in life they have enormous
health problems.'

The litany of serious abuses against women and girls can
seem endless: child marriages, forced marriages, kidnapping
and forced prostitution, sex slavery. According to the U.N.
report, 'A study in India estimated that prenatal sex
selection and infanticide have accounted for half a million
missing girls per year for the past two decades.'

The most common form of serious abuse against women and
girls around the globe is violence by intimate partners.
Huge percentages of female murder victims, even in such
developed countries as Australia, Canada, Israel and the
United States, are killed by current or former husbands or
boyfriends.

A study of young, female murder victims in the U.S. found
that homicide was the second leading cause of death for
girls 15 to 18, and that 78 percent of all the homicide
victims in the study had been killed by an acquaintance or
intimate partner.

The U.N. report tells us what we should already have
concluded: that this pervasive violence against women,
'whether perpetrated by the state and its agents, or by
family members or strangers, in the public or private sphere
, in peacetime or in times of conflict,' is unacceptable.

Not only are we not doing enough to counter this wholesale
destruction of the lives of so many women and girls, we're
not even paying close attention. There are women's movements
in even the smallest countries fighting against the violence
and other forms of abuse. But they are underfunded and get
very little support from those in a position to help. (Even
in Afghanistan under the Taliban there were women who ran
underground schools, and girls who risked their lives to go
to them.)

There was a time when activists cried out for our
consciousness to be raised. It's not too late. We can start
by recognizing that the systematic subordination and
brutalization of women and girls around the world is, in
fact, occurring - and that we need to do something about it.