What About Our World's Women? Part 2

The subject matter addressed in this blog post is graphic and addresses the atrocious rape of women, some of these acts are of stunning brutality. Please note this before reading further.

The UN recently released Progress of the World's Women: In Pursuit of Justice, a report offering a comprehensive global review of womens' rights around the world. The report focuses on items such as gender based violence, equal pay, number of women represented in government and post-conflict justice.

The report is a bit of a paradox. Although it reports that there has been a significant increase in laws supporting the rights of women, it also reports that these new laws are rarely enforced.

Despite major progress on legal frameworks, millions of women report experiencing violence in their lifetime, usually at the hands of an intimate partner. Meanwhile, the specific targeting of women for brutal sexual violence is a hallmark of modern conflicts....Although equality between women and men is guaranteed in the Constitutions of 139 countries and territories, inadequate laws and implementation gaps make these guarantees hollow promises, having little impact on the day-to-day lives of women. In many contexts, in rich and poor countries alike, the infrastructure of justice – the police, the courts and the judiciary – is failing women, which manifests itself in poor services and hostile attitudes from the very people whose duty it is to meet women’s rights.

In reading this report, I couldn't help but think again of the book I'm currently reading, Half the Sky. (I wrote about the book in my last post.) In the section I'm reading now, rape is discussed in depth and in gory detail. One of the topics the book examines is the current state of rape as used in warfare. While reading, one country stood out more than any other (due to its abominable crimes), that of the eastern Congo.

Its methods are as equally horrifying as they are sickening. The author writes, "Militia members consider it risky to engage in firefights with other gunmen, so instead they assault civilians." What this means is instead of killing men with weapons, soldiers are violently and systematically raping women. They rape women by tearing their insides with knives, sticks, bayonets or fire their gun into a woman's vagina. One such case wasn't a woman, but instead a three year old girl. Soldiers raped her and then fired a gun inside her "When surgeons saw her, there was no tissue left to repair. The little girl's grief stricken father then committed suicide."

In just the Congolese province of South Kivu, the UN estimates that there were twenty-seven thousand sexual assaults in 2006. 27,000! And these statistics are not old, the rapes continue.

Here's information gathered from an article by Jeffrey Gettelman, Rapes Are Again Reported in Eastern Congo, posted in February of this year:

Aid workers in Fizi said more than 150 people had been raped since the beginning of the year, with at least five cases of large groups of people being attacked at the same time, often going or coming from local markets.

Gettelman further notes:

The Congolese government's hold on the country is notoriously weak with large stretches of land outside its control.

These are some of the horrific challenges facing women and they're happening right now, as you read this very page. Acts of rape are, to me, one of the worst acts a woman would ever have to face and they're happening all around the world.

In rural Pakistan, women are raped as a punishment for a crime committed by a family member. The story of Mukhtar is one such story. Her brother was accused of committing a crime and, as punishment, the tribal council sentenced Mukhtar, the sister of the accused, to be gang raped. Four men dragged her kicking and screaming into an empty stable next to the meeting area and, as a crowd waited outside, they stripped and raped her one by one. Typically, after such a shame occurs, the girl has no choice but to commit suicide, as is the only way to restore the family's honor. Rape, regardless of the circumstances, always makes the girl unclean, as she no longer retains her virginity. The only way cleanse the family of shame is to kill herself.

Reading these stories made me cry and they left me nauseated, writing about them have brought back these feelings. I'll confess I debated over whether or not I wanted to document these stories with such candor. They're uncomfortable. They're sickening.

But we should be uncomfortable and we should be sickened. This is our world and these things are happening! We should, each of us, be doing something about it.

Half the Sky, offers ways for you to get involved, so get moving! Don't shrug off these stories, help stop them.

Find ways you can help at: http://www.halftheskymovement.org/get-involved