Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, April 19, 1993 TAG: 9304190248
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
But where is the international outrage because South African women are raped, on the average of one every minute and a half?
Or when a school principal in Kenya excuses male students who raped 71 female classmates by saying, "the boys never meant any harm against the girls. They just wanted to rape"?
Or when China drowns female babies?
Or when a man in Egypt is acquitted of beating his wife because he said his religion, Islam, permits it?
Or when women are sold as adolescents into AIDS-plagued prostitution rings?
Or when they are genitally mutilated so they can't have sex?
Or set afire by mothers-in-law who are dissatisfied with their dowries?
Where, for that matter, is the international outcry when a man is acquitted in Florida of abducting and raping a woman at knife-point because a juror said she "asked for it" by wearing suggestive clothing?
The ugly truth is that women are universally being subjected to such atrocities every day - simply because they are women.
There is an epidemic of sexual abuse, sexual violence, sexual killings and sexual discrimination. Yet - unlike systematic persecution based on race or religion - the world chooses largely to ignore it.
Not everyone is ignoring it. In the United States, for instance, the topics of rape, wife abuse, child abuse and sexual harassment and sexual discrimination in the work place have gotten a thorough going-over in recent years - in the media and in the nation's conscience. Laws to protect women have been strengthened.
Still, even in the most advanced and civilized lands, women are not safe from sexual abuse or violence. And still - in America no less than in Third World countries - much of this violence is committed in women's own homes.
This summer, at the United Nations World Conference on Human Rights, an attempt will be made to get international recognition that violence against women is a human-rights issue of dramatic concern for the entire world.
Such recognition is long overdue. Helping it along may be the growing awareness that this is also an economic-development issue, facing the entire world.
Consider statistics presented at a U.N. conference some years ago, indicating that women as it is perform more than two-thirds of the world's work, produce 45 percent of its food, and take responsibility for raising the vast majority of the world's children. Unquestionably, oppression of women has done staggering harm to global economic productivity.
Meanwhile, few people in international leadership positions - still mostly men - are paying sufficient attention.
"There is a lot of resistance," says Lori Heise, director of the Violence, Health and Development Program at the Center for Women's Global Leadership at Rutgers University in New Jersey. "The real reason is that no one in power cares."
In other words: Who cares if violence is perpetrated against women by family members or friends? As long as it's not nations or governments doing the perpetrating, it doesn't count as human-rights abuses that get other nations up in arms.
This reasoning follows the same line as the defense used by a South Carolina man in 1991. The man, who had videotaped himself binding and gagging his screaming wife on their bed, testified: "I didn't rape by wife. How can you rape your wife?" He was found not guilty.
In 1958, former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt said this: "Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In the small places, close to home . . . the neighborhood, the school or college, the factory, farm or office . . . Unless these rights have meaning here, they have little meaning anywhere."
It was Roosevelt who encouraged the United Nations to include gender in the text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the General Assembly in 1948.
Forty-five years later, her call for an international response to horrifying, worldwide abuse of women has yet to be answered.
by CNB