Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 23, 1993 TAG: 9305230196
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By ANNE REIFENBERG\KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
DATELINE: UNITED NATIONS LENGTH: Long
The petitions seem not to ask for much, only that violence against women be recognized as a human-rights abuse and discussed at this summer's United Nations World Conference on Human Rights.
But the truth is that women are battered and raped and killed every day for making demands far less bold - regularly for simply being women. And so the request that this horrific fact of life be viewed in the context of human rights is not that simple after all.
"There is a lot of resistance to it," said Lori Heise, director of the Violence, Health and Development Program at the Center for Women's Global Leadership at Rutgers University, which is organizing the petition drive. Attempts to justify resistance, she said, rely on the argument that "things perpetrated by the state rather than by an individual or family" constitute human-rights abuses. "The real reason is that no one in power cares."
No international uproar has arisen over the fact that in the United States, a woman is battered every 15 seconds. That in Oklahoma, if she is raped by her husband, it is not a crime. That in Pakistan, if she is bold enough to report a rape, she might be stoned to death for having committed adultery. That in Barbados, she has a one-in-three chance of being sexually molested before she reaches adolescence.
"It is an absolutely dramatic situation worldwide," said Anne Walker, director of the International Women's Tribune Centre in New York. The center is a nonprofit organization active in the petition drive.
"It's epidemic. . . . But it is not taken seriously."
Some countries, some societies take the matter quite seriously. But the violence is universal, and activists complain that condemnation of it is not.
Human-rights advocates, who view systematic discrimination based on race or religion as persecution, are only now beginning to wrap some gender-based violence in the same ugly package. Only now are they beginning to consider the implications of the fact that women are reguarly sexually or physically injured or killed because they are women.
Women are extinguished in the womb, killed hours after birth, sold as adolescents into physically abusive marriages or AIDS-plagued prostitution rings.
They are genitally mutilated so they cannot have sex, set afire by mothers-in-law dissatisfied with their dowries, beheaded by fathers whom they have shamed, beaten by husbands because dinner is late.
They are raped by boyfriends, spouses, strangers, police officers or the military, for punishment, for torture, for strategic reasons during war, for a lark, for, seemingly, no reason at all.
Although the killing of student demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989 produced cries of outrage and calls for diplomatic isolation, the drowning of girl babies in China does not. The horrors of apartheid were cause for worldwide condemnation and costly economic sanctions, but the fact that a woman is raped every minute and a half in South Africa is not.
"The issue has been made invisible, by men, by culture, by women because of fear," said Maria Suarez, a Costa Rican human-rights activist. "But it's costing too many lives to ignore it any more."
The call to arms went out when plans were announced for the World Conference on Human Rights, the first such summit in 25 years and only the second since the United Nations was established in 1945.
Activists saw their chance to link women's rights with human rights on a public stage, and at a time when the United Nations faces pressure, from Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali and others, to redesign its troubled human-rights agenda.
Just 1 percent of the $2 billion biannual U.N. budget is dedicated to human-rights activities. And its Human Rights Commission is not considered a force to be reckoned with by many governments, which often fail to file reports, neglect findings and refuse to allow investigators into their countries.
"Human rights have really fallen to the bottom of the pile at the United Nations," said Jim O'Dea, Washington director of Amnesty International.
"We have new opportunities to really build the kind of human-rights structure envisioned after World War II . . . and to fully incorporate women into it."
The petition drive was launched with that goal. The petition says, "We demand that gender violence, a universal phenomenon which takes many forms across culture, race and class, be recognized as a violation of human rights requiring immediate action."
By the end of March, 200,000 signatures had been delivered, from 119 countries in every corner of the world. Women might never have heard of the United Nations, said Vasanth Kannabiran, the secretary of a development agency in central India who distributes the petitions in rural areas, but they all know, instinctively and intimately, about violence.
"They feel important to be part of an international movement. . . . They are not afraid. Many, you think, should be, but they are not."
Women the world over have cause for fear. Some countries boast laws against domestic violence, against rape, against sexual slavery, against genital mutilation, against all manner of abuse of women. Some countries have precious few such laws. It seems not to matter - the violence is universal.
In societies where it is debated, women are not necessarily safer than in those where it is not. There persists a tendency to justify some kinds of violence against some kinds of women.
Look at Australia, where in 1981, in a decision cited in a defense as recently as last year, the Supreme Court opined that "prostitutes suffer little or no sense of shame or defilement" when raped.
Look at the United States, where four years ago in Florida a man charged with abducting and raping a woman at knifepoint was acquitted because, a juror said, the woman had "asked for it" by wearing a lace miniskirt without underwear. And where in 1991 a South Carolina man who had videotaped himself binding and gagging his screaming wife on their bed was found not guilty of rape after he testified: "I didn't rape my wife. How can you rape your\ wife?"
Such questions are, in fact, troubling even to activists. What right has any international tribunal to judge what happens between a husband and wife in the privacy of their home? What does it matter to one country that rape is epidemic in another? Why should Canada's Parliament care that girl babies in Bangladesh are given less food than boys, or why should Japan's Diet care that women in China keep a bucket of water beside the birthing bed in which to kill their female offspring?
Former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt sought to answer the questions in 1958: "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."
Some activists make their argument one of economic development. They acknowledge that the costs of the violence suffered by women are undocumented. But if women do, in fact, perform more than two-thirds of the work in the world, produce 45 percent of its food and take responsibility for raising the vast majority of its children - as statistics presented at the 1980 U.N. Conference on Women indicated - the costs must be staggering.
Consider that in the United States, more women seek hospital emergency room treatment for battery by a mate than they do for auto accidents, muggings and rape combined. A woman so badly beaten might lose days at work, or lose her job altogether, falling onto the welfare rolls. The economy is deprived of her skills, and the state is left to care for her, and most likely for her children.
"The impact of violence against women on productivity is phenomenal. It is one of the most serious things the world faces. Until the degradation of women is coped with and given credence as a development issue, we are not going to see a `new world order,' " said Walker of the International Women's Tribune Centre. "We are ignoring 50 percent of the people who make the world work."
The provisional agenda for the June 14-25 human-rights conference in Vienna includes this item: "Consideration of the contemporary trends in the new challenges to the full realization of all human rights of women and men, including those of persons belonging to vulnerable groups."
The language is, for the United Nations, considered quite dramatic, not in the least because it mentions women before men.
All agree that a strong conference statement is necessary. The United Nations can with mere words still effect some change, if only by embarrassing its members.
"Governments do take notice of what the U.N. says. They are a bit scared of the U.N. putting sanctions or punishing them in some way, by withdrawing funds or singling them out in some report," said Shamina Ali, director of Fiji's Rape Crisis Center. "Once the United Nations recognizes [violence against women] as a human-rights violation, women will take it more seriously, governments will take it more seriously, and our courts will take it more seriously."
You can write to: United Nations, Room S, 2925 United Nations, New York, N.Y. 10017
by CNB