The Society of Women in the World

From a recent publication, “Women in an Insecure World - Violence Against Women: Facts, Figures, & Analysis” (.pdf file, alternate site .pdf file) by the Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF), we learn that at least one out of every three women has been beaten, coerced into sex, or abused in her lifetime.

At least 700,000 women a year are sold into prostitution. Violence against women ranks as the fourth leading cause of premature death in the world, ranking behind only disease, hunger and war.

One United Nations’ estimate says that between 113 million and 200 million women around the world are “missing.” Every year, between 1.5 million and 3 million women and girls lose their lives as a result of gender-based violence or neglect. As the Economist, which reported on the policy paper, put it last November, “Every two to four years the world looks away from a victim count on the scale of Hitler’s Holocaust.” - [Source, based on the above linked report.]

You might want to read that again. And I urge everyone to download and read that entire .pdf file, as well.

We are clearly not living in a society that respects women and girls. And this actually has little to do with whether our societies and cultures are religious or secular. But we don’t talk about it, we don’t see it on the evening news, we aren’t assembling armies and weapons of mass destruction to liberate women and girls from their predators, and there are no angry mobs protesting in the streets about human trafficking or the millions of ‘disappeared’ throughout the world.

Violent relationships, poverty and insecure housing affect many working class women; wealthy women can always fly out of town or out of the country for their abortions with no one the wiser.

Rape victims can often only see all men as the enemy… or feel shame and blame themselves. The result is severe psychological damage. Religious ideas, especially the characteristic cult of virginity (and you know which religions push this as well as I do, so no need to name names), encourages intense self-loathing, rather than compassion and help for the victims.

Rhetoric by pundits on television or the Internet about exposing women who make ‘false accusations’ is obscene, considering…

Few like to look at them, but the statistics on rape convictions are unbearably bleak: reported rape has trebled in the past decade; less than 6% of reported rapes result in a conviction; less than 20% of rapes are reported to the police. There is more rape, and it is easier to get away with. [Source]

Those figures are for 2004 in the UK, but the situation is similar world-wide, and not limited to ‘undeveloped’ countries.

Violence against women in conflict situations assumes many forms; rape is often only one of the ways in which women are targeted. But while other abuses, such as murder and other forms of torture have long been denounced as war crimes, rape has been downplayed as an unfortunate but inevitable side effect of sending men to war. Although men also are raped, efforts to document wartime rape reveal that women overwhelmingly are its most frequent targets. It is thus ignored as a human rights abuse.

The use of rape as a tool of war has garnered relatively insignificant international or mainstream religious attention. Provisions protecting women from rape have existed in international humanitarian law only since about the mid-20th century.

By looking at rape as a crime against Honor, as many religions do, it also becomes a crime against the community or her husband and family, instead of a crime against the physical integrity of the victim herself… it establishes the victim as responsible for the loss of community honor rather than focusing on the attacker as responsible for the violation of the victim’s physical integrity. It’s bad enough that rape victims may come to hate all men, but it’s worse when they not only feel their own shame, but also blame themselves… and then those who are supposed to be concerned, supportive, and compassionate also take that ‘blame the victim’ stance.

The above was posted as a comment in “The dirty little secret of fundamentalism” by Djehuty at Newsvine.