generalspeaking

March 8, International Women's Day

The world body celebrates International Women's Day on March 8. There is no 'international men's day'. Women's condition in the world is a special one, an especially troubled one. Their gender makes them vulnerable. They present biologically as vessels of new life. But they are also horribly exploited as objects of possession, alternating with objects of violent derision, counterpointed as presenting as a helpless object of degrading violation.

There is no exempt age group. Be they grandmotherly or mere children, and all women of increasing or decreasing chronological age, whether sound in mind and body or those whom genetic misfortune has left incapable of comprehending what is occurring, as opposed to those whose physical malformations usually elicit disinterest, they all present as viable figures for violent degradation in the invasion of their innermost, uttermost sanctity.

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has issued a plea for political leaders the world over, and their governments, to recognize violence against women for the abomination that it represents. "Violence against women cannot be tolerated, in any form, in any context, in any circumstance, by any political leader or by any government" he emphasized.

Recently returned from a week of travelling around a number of African countries, among which was the Democratic Republic of Congo, where, as it is elsewhere on the Continent, rape is an accepted 'weapon of war' against the frail and the helpless, he spoke of the violence and brutality meted out by soldiers gang-raping women and girls, most of whom suffer irreparable harm, both psychically and physically.

Sexual violence is rampant across the world stage, but endemic in many countries of the world. Women represent over fifty percent of the world population. Violence and rape is a human tragedy, and a true crime against humanity. From familial beatings and abuse of girl children and their mothers, to random rapes, every single event accounts as attacks against the very fabric of the social contract.

The United Nations unveils statistics claiming that worldwide, one in five women are the victims of rape or attempted rape. While across the board one in three women suffer some level of abuse, and all too often those who visit that violence upon women go unchallenged, not held to account, unpunished, particularly in those countries where those abuses are commonly held to be simply the way things are.

According to Medecines sans Frontieres, their teams treated roughly 35 victims of rape and sexual assault daily in 2007 alone. Commonplace occurrences at any time, but accelerated during times of stress and conflict. Male hostility to women constitutes a dread and ongoing threat to women and children; fully half of rapes committed occur to minor females.

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and International Crisis Group along with Physicians for Human Rights all have documented the ongoing human tragedy of systematic rape and sexual torture of women throughout the decade-long period of Zimbabwe's political violence. This is systemic and institutionalized. Human rights groups documented widespread torture of the country's opposition supporters, of whom 40% were women.

Beaten, stripped, humiliated and abused. Rape and sexual torture of women steadily rose in prevalence and became increasingly brutal. Such violations would occur in front of neighbours, of the victim's families, all too fearful to intervene. Entire communities would be traumatized. This was the government of Robert Mugabe's gentle reminder that he does not tolerate dissent.

But it is not only countries at war that horribly persecute and violate women. South Africa, that bastion of freedom and new political, social opportunities presenting as the new Africa, also distinguishes itself as one of the world's most violence-prone countries for women where brutality against women and the common occurrence of rape, elevates it to another kind of distinction altogether.

In a newly-issued report, Medecines sans Frontieres highlights some of the countries whose females suffer high incidences of violence and rape. They include Liberia, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa and Colombia, where, they assert, 35 women a day are the victims of rape. Unlike, however, South Africa, where it is estimated a woman is violated every 26 seconds.

It becomes abundantly clear why a special day is set aside to remind the world community of the tenuous, painful, fearful and deplorably fraught lives women lead, around the world. So let's hear it for International Women's Day.

Labels: Political Realities, Societal Failures, World Crises

posted by Pieface @ Friday, March 06, 2009