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TechnoratiThe Bush Administration has made much of its June 19 triumph in the Security Council in getting unanimous backing for a resolution aimed at curtailing sexual violence against women caught up in conflict. This was no small feat, given the perennial reluctance of some Council members to accept that rape and other violent abuses of women and girls are matters of peace and security. (Ask the women of Darfur or the Democratic Republic of Congo about that.)
The utmost American effort went into lining up all fifteen votes for the resolution, apparently cinched by some high-level last-minute intervention by Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and the inevitable tinkering with words. Resolution 1820 was welcomed widely by human rights organizations, women's advocacy groups and some frontline UN agencies.
But how does this advance the cause of the world's most vulnerable women? What difference will it make?
This is the administration in Washington that has cut off aid--now totaling nearly $300 million over seven years, with the latest installment axed on June 27--to the United Nations Population Fund, which tries to help sexually violated women meet their most urgent and intimate needs, including safe abortions and "morning after" contraceptives. A woman in a besieged refugee camp is not terribly interested in lectures about abstinence, either.
Nearly eight years ago, the Security Council truly broke new ground with another resolution, the now-iconic Resolution 1325, which went straight for the abuses of women in conflict and its aftermath and also targeted the scandalous neglect of women's voices "at all decision-making levels in national, regional and international institutions." Peacekeeping and peacebuilding would now take women into account, that resolution said. But the rape goes on, sometimes by peacekeepers as well as combatants. And getting places for women at negotiating tables is still an uphill struggle.
The new US-sponsored resolution does not establish the principle that tactical rape is a war crime, as some media reported. That has been accepted internationally the since the mid-1990s, says Rhonda Copelon of CUNY School of Law, who directs the International Women's Human Rights Law Clinic. War crimes tribunals for Rwanda and the Balkans have convicted men for rape. Sexual abuse is enshrined as a war crime in the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
Nor does the new resolution set out sanctions against governments or militias or any other parties to a conflict that employ systematic abuses of women, which can include impregnating "the other" to sully ethnicity or race, or torturing women and girls in front of their menfolk to inflict the worst humiliation, helplessness and grief. The new measure does, however, edge toward a readiness to "adopt appropriate steps to address widespread or systematic sexual violence." But only "where necessary," whatever that means.
Direct threats to offenders against half the human race, coupled with enforcement measures, would have been too much for the council to live with, though UNICEF says that violence against women and girls is perhaps the most pervasive of human rights violations. Instead, the resolution calls for another report by the Secretary General, due next June. The mandate for the report is peppered with words such as analysis, benchmarks and proposals. In the intervening year, countless women will die, and girls will become sex slaves to brutal armies and pick-up militias--the Burmese military and the warlords of Congo come to mind.
There were apparently four countries that took a lot of persuading to join the consensus for unanimity: China, Russia, Indonesia and Vietnam, the latter two holding rotating seats on the council. This is not to say that those governments in any way condone sexual violence as a tactic of warfare. At the UN things are always more complicated than that. There is a genuine concern in some nations that issues involving the treatment of civilian populations belong in the humanitarian agencies or in the Economic and Social Council, which could be a valid point if that body had any backbone or remaining clout. There is always the fear that somehow the Security Council may be moving toward poking its way into the affairs of any government it chooses. Today, Sudan; tomorrow, who? It was on this last point that a workable linguistic compromise seems to have finally been struck. When all is said and done, the scrutiny in the new report from the secretary general will be limited to situations already "on the agenda of the Council." No surprises.
If countries where horrific abuses take place reject as a breach of sovereignty all outside intervention, or even help, and refuse to save their own people from abuse and violent death, what hope can there be for victims? The circle is closed.
Moreover, there is an underlying, more corrosive reluctance among member nations of the UN to confront the issue of abuses against women generally. UN documents, mission statements, guidelines, how-not-to books and years of speeches have paid lip service to ending the routine abasement of women in many places, in peace as well as war. In the UN there are slogans about how "women's rights are human rights" and commitments to gender mainstreaming and statements about the empowerment of women as the key to ending poverty. Yet UN statistics on the lives of the majority of the world's women, particularly in Africa and South Asia, tell a different story--a story of absent rights, the denial of schooling, the lack of control over their own bodies. Meanwhile, the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) is lining up a hoped-for 1 million signers of a petition against violence, to add to the archive of ringing declarations from international conferences and exhortations by UN officials. Governments are asked to make a public pledge: "Say no to violence against women."
Pledges? Why not just do something.
Barbara Crossette, former foreign correspondent for the New York Times, was South Asia bureau chief from 1988 to 1991 and UN bureau chief from 1994 to 2001.
Copyright © 2008 The Nation
9 Comments so far
Show AllGuru Nanak
Sikh guru, 1469-1539ad
We are conceived in woman,
We are born of woman.
It is to woman we get engaged,
And then get married.
Woman is our lifelong companion,
And supporter of our survival.
It is through woman
That we establish social relationships.
Why should we denounce her
When even kings and great men are born from her?
Born of women, nourished by women, wedded to women, how can they revile women? How can women be called inferior when they give birth to kings and prophets?
Two days before our much-loved July 4 celebration of our nation, and all I can think is that many women from many countries really ought to be eligible for political asylum. But the idea is laughable to most people.
From the article, I think this statement says a lot about the blindness of our government and our people -
"A woman in a besieged refugee camp is not terribly interested in lectures about abstinence, either."
And I think about the many rape babies, knowing lack of birthcontrol has always been the goal of anti-abortion groups, no matter how many members don't actually realize it, I know it's intentional when I read -
"...systematic abuses of women, which can include impregnating "the other" to sully ethnicity or race"
TruOrange July 1st, 2008 4:25 pm wrote:
"I have cut passages from a 30 June, 2008 article from Int'l Herald Tribune about child brides - little girls as young as 8 years old being 'given in marriage.'"
When I watched a documentary on tv, I saw the "marriage" of one such girl. Child. They, as is common custom, wrapped her up in a rug, rolled her up in it. So you couldn't see her face, or how small she was, compared to the many men on horses celebrating, loud laughter, joyful.
What got me was her screams. Because I am a mother, and I have that built-in response to the cries of babies. And that's what really got me. It brought tears to my eyes and still does, because she didn't sound like a woman, or even a little girl. She sounded like a baby. Like a little baby. It was the shrieks of a baby. Shrieks of terror, and the sex of the child was impossible to identify. Could have been one of my own children. The screams of a baby, as they road off with her like so much luggage. So happy, shooting the rifles into the airs, making a big show of it.
If I've said it once I've said it a thousand times now. I am thankful I have no daughters. It's just too unfair and dangerous, no matter where you live. As a child rape victim myself, in our most advanced of nations. No one ever found out and nothing was ever done. He's dead now, because he was old then, and that's all I have. Hands with liver spots are all I remember about him, aside from him being the only un-circumcized person I ever...saw. I think I was four. I wonder how many children came before me. It was a daycare, what they called "nursery school" in my day. I never even told my parents. By the time I figured it out, as an adult, I realized it might kill them, if they knew.
So, I know all to well how perilous our fate is. All to often, it's a matter of luck, sometimes, bad luck. Even in our nation, statistics such as one out of every four women will be raped in her livetime. In our military, one out of three. From birth till death, gender can be hazardous to your health. Somehow, these glaring numbers are seldom mentioned, and frequently denied. The holes in my memory are all I need to tell me to be thankful I didn't hand over another girl child to this world of men.
Perhaps if more mothers told their sons, as I have, that if they ever rape anyone, I will...well, threats and promises, and I'd be the one to turn them in to the authorities...after a solid beating. They know I mean what I say. I wish more mothers were as furious as I am about rape and conveyed those feelings to their sons. It's all I can do, but I've done what I can. Wish more people would.
Peace and love to you all.
...And then there is the Juarez Femicides, a topic that perrenially pops up, generates outrage, then sinks beneath the radar once again. Google it up, search for it on youtube, there's an overwhelming amount of documentation that simply keeps growing, year after year after year after year... what does it take to finally keep this above the radar, some sort of feature movie?
The bureaucracy of rape is similar. Cultural institutionalization of uncivilized behavior seems to be the goal behind everything; literally the systematic deconstruction of anything civilized, as if civilization itself was anathema and antithetical to the pure power of barbarity. Oh wait, it is...
If you would like a real good picture of what happens to child brides or wives in India, once their husbands die, checkout the DVD "Water". It is beautifully done and set in Ghandi's time, but the same practices are still occuring today in modern India. Until women are respected for their worth without a man, life is always going to be too hard and often so aweful to bear. Thank god, I live in the US where I do have half a fighting chance for survival and a good life. I wouldn't trade places with any of these women.
One should also be wary of any hidden agendas behind the "moral panic" that can be triggered by stories that touch a raw nerve, such as that of Child Brides. There's a long history of using decontextualized atrocity-tales to stoke a smug ethnic or group narcissism that lends itself to an oxymoron like 'waging war to save lives'. As Mahmood Mamdani put it in last year:
...every major intervention has been justified as humanitarian, a 'civilising mission'. Nor was it mere idiosyncrasy that inspired the devotion with which many colonial officers and archivists recorded the details of barbarity among the colonised--sati, the ban on widow marriage or the practice of child marriage in India, or slavery and female genital mutilation in Africa. I am not suggesting that this was all invention. I mean only to point out that the chronicling of atrocities had a practical purpose: it provided the moral pretext for intervention. Now, as then, imperial interventions claim to have a dual purpose: on the one hand, to rescue minority victims of ongoing barbarities and, on the other, to quarantine majority perpetrators with the stated aim of civilising them. Iraq should act as a warning on this score.
Nicholas Dirks has also written about the 'missionary fervor about issues such as sati and thuggee (not to mention the much larger, though not unrelated, global fervor about slavery) to make empire not just better, but a necessary feature of British identity.'
I apologize in advance for the length of this posting. The problem is much larger than protecting women caught up in conflict. It's about violence against women and girls all over the world - conflict or no.
I have cut passages from a 30 June, 2008 article from Int'l Herald Tribune about child brides - little girls as young as 8 years old being 'given in marriage.'
What is happening to these young girls is as horrific as what's happening to women and girls in The Congo and Sudan (possibly in the Appalachian hinderlands, too for all I know).
How is the violence to be stopped? I don't know. I only know that it must.
Article follows. Please don't skip over it.
Child brides give voice to their defiance in Yemen
by Robert F. Worth Published: June 29, 2008
JIBLA, Yemen: One morning last month, Arwa Abdu Muhammad Ali walked out of her husband's house here and ran to a local hospital, where she complained that he had been beating and sexually abusing her for eight months.
That alone would be surprising in Yemen, a deeply conservative Arab society where family disputes tend to be solved privately. What made it even more unusual was that Arwa was 9 years old.
Within days, Arwa - a tiny, delicate-featured girl - had become a celebrity in Yemen, where child marriage is common but has rarely been exposed in public. She was the second child bride to come forward in less than a month; in April, a 10-year-old named Nujood Ali had gone by herself to a courthouse to demand a divorce, generating a landmark legal case.
Together, the two girls' stories have helped spur a movement to put an end to child marriage, which is increasingly seen as a crucial part of the cycle of poverty in Yemen and other developing countries.
Pulled out of school and forced to have children before their bodies are ready, many rural Yemeni women end up illiterate and with serious health problems. Their babies are often stunted, too.
The average age of marriage in Yemen's rural areas is 12 to 13, a recent study by Sana University researchers found. The country, at the southern corner of the Arabian Peninsula, has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world.
But despite a rising tide of outrage, the fight against the practice is not easy. Hard-line Islamic conservatives, whose influence has grown enormously in the past two decades, defend it, pointing to the Prophet Muhammad's marriage to a 9-year-old. Child marriage is deeply rooted in local custom here, and even enshrined in an old tribal expression: "Give me a girl of 8, and I can give you a guarantee" for a good marriage.
The issue first arose because of Nujood. Her ordeal began in February, when her father took her from Sana, the Yemeni capital, to his home village for the wedding.
She was given almost no warning.
The trouble started on the first night, when her 30-year-old husband, Faez Ali Thamer, took off her clothes as soon as the light was out. She ran crying from the room, but he caught her, brought her back and forced himself on her. Later, he beat her as well.
Her father, Ali Muhammad al-Ahdal, said he had agreed to the marriage because two of Nujood's older sisters had been kidnapped and forcibly married, with one of them ending up in jail. Al-Ahdal said he had feared the same thing would happen to Nujood, and early marriage had seemed a better alternative.
A gaunt, broken-looking man, Ahdal once worked as a street sweeper. Now he and his family beg for a living. He has 16 children by two women.
Poverty is one reason so many Yemeni families marry their children off early. Another is the fear of girls being carried off and married by force. But most important are cultural tradition and the belief that a young virginal bride can best be shaped into a dutiful wife, according to a comprehensive study of early marriage published by Sana University in 2006.
Nujood complained to her family, but they said they could do nothing. To break a marriage would expose the family to shame. Finally, her uncle told her to go to court. On April 2, she said, she walked out of the house by herself and hailed a taxi.
It was the first time she had traveled anywhere alone and she was frightened. On arriving at the courthouse, she was told the judge was busy, so she sat on a bench and waited.
Suddenly he was standing over her, imposing in his dark robes.
"You're married?" he said, with shock in his voice.
Nujood's case was called on the next Sunday, her father and husband were there; the judge had jailed them the night before to ensure that they would appear in court. "Do you want a separation, or a permanent divorce?" Qadhi asked the girl, after hearing all of the testimony.
"I want a permanent divorce," she replied, without hesitation. The judge granted it.
Nujood swears she will never marry again, and she wants to become a human rights lawyer, like her attorney, Shada Nasser, or perhaps a journalist.
A 1992 Yemeni law set the minimum legal age of marriage at 15. But in 1998 Parliament revised it, allowing girls to be married earlier as long as they did not move in with their husbands until they reached sexual maturity.
After Nujood's case became public, Shada Nasser, Nujood's attorney said she received angry letters from conservative women denouncing her for her role. But she has also begun receiving calls about girls, some younger than Nujood, trying to escape their marriages.
One of them was Arwa, who was married last year at the age of 8. As with Nujood's case, Arwa's situation aroused a legal and social outrage.
Standing outside a relative's house here, her hands clasped in front of her, Arwa described how surprised she was when her father arranged her marriage to a 35-year-old man eight months ago. Like Nujood, she did not know the facts of life, she said. The man raped and beat her.
Finally, after months of misery, she ran to a hospital. A local judge, on receiving her case, briefly jailed the judge who had approved the marriage contract. Arwa is living with relatives while her case awaits a resolution. But her relatives rarely let her out of the house, fearing that her husband, who has refused the judge's demands that he appear in court, may take her again.
Asked what made her flee her husband after so many months, Arwa gazed up, an intense, defiant expression in her eyes.
"I thought about it," she said in a very quiet but firm voice. "I thought about it."
Tragic as it is, it is going to be especially difficult to change mens attitudes towards women in these regions. Some like to blame it on religion but I think the larger culprit is the lack of a history of Liberalism in these regions.
It a tragic fact that women in Iraq under Saddam Hussein had more in the way of rights then they do today with the newly "Democratic" Government of Iraq and its newly "liberated" people.
I really have no idea of an effective solution that will not take centuries to implement.
When I saw the headline I thought it might be talking about the sexual assaults on US female military personnel by their male colleagues.
Such assaults continue long after the physical act is over when the victim tries to report it through their military chain of command. Might that be covered by the UN resolution?--hmmm.
Because doing something would challenge the most sacred beliefs held by many of the men in these countries; the belief that women are property and that men should be able to do what they want with their property or another man's property.
Until women occupy more political, governmental, social and corporate positions of authority and power, we will always be on the receiving end of whatever these men feel is our due.
Having Dubya (who is the father of 2 daughters), the President, refuse to fund needed health services for women is shameful and he needs to be shamed into changing his practices. What is really sad, is that his Secretary of State, Condi Rice, is so ineffective in influencing his decisions. What we need is a change in leadership, which will come this Fall, but until then, a lot of women will suffer needlessly.