Women’s Rights are Security Imperative

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Related subjects: Africa, Darfur crisis, Diplomacy & Politics, DR Congo conflict, Evelyn Winston Pérez, Fair Trade, Gender Equality, Global, Humanitarian Crisis, J.E. Robertson, L'accés: Society of Access, Rights & Freedoms Comments (1)

23 September 2009 :: Evelyn Winston Perez

The issue of women’s equality is a question as old as human history. And even now, in the most modern of democracies, which guarantee more or less political and economic equality for women, there remain fundamental imbalances in rights, privileges and enforcement. Women are often guaranteed freedom from discrimination, but nevertheless suffer essential inequalities that do in fact alter the landscape of their choices and freedoms.

Economic rights in the developed world remain a serious issue where gender-based inequality must be addressed. In most developed democracies, women enjoy 100% equal rights in terms of property ownership, education, voting and political freedoms. But wages are still on average significantly lower for women, property tied up in marriages is often harder for women to hold onto, and in the worst cases, the modern slave traffic deals mostly in women and young girls, even in the most advanced democracies.

In the developing world, the situation is vastly more dire. Women in Africa suffer such a serious threat of death in childbirth that some fear if something is not done to provide adequate obstetric care to remote areas, population levels in poor African nations could fall dramatically, at a time when development requires an expanding workforce. The result of maternal mortality rates, barring women’s access to education, and rampant violence against women, is prolonged political instability.

In a nation like the Democratic Republic of Congo, where a multi-front civil war has plagued the nation since 1998, and as many as 14 neighboring countries were involved in combat or in supplying fighters with weapons and support, the extreme violence suffered by women is part of what keeps the war going. Rape has been used as a weapon of war, and impunity among both government and rebel forces in the eastern Kivu provinces means extreme violence begets more violence, with women constantly under threat from neighbors and invaders alike.

Maternal mortality rates in Africa are now a kind of epidemic, which actually spreads in a way similar to contagion, as resources are drained away from one village after another, and central governments dealing with unstable security situations abandon remote areas, let infrastructure collapse or even force out the charity groups that might be a region’s only means of reliable up-to-date medical care.

1,500 women are dying in childbirth every day across Africa, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). That’s roughly 1,000 women per 100,000 live births, meaning a woman has a one in 100 chance of dying in childbirth. The situation is severe enough that the US Congress has been working on legislation that could make protecting women and girls, including maternal health, a focus of all US foreign aid.

In a Guardian newspaper blog on Katine, Uganda, Sarah Bosely writes:

The other day I watched a woman die. A small crowd of nursing staff, orderlies and onlookers clustered round the bed in the treatment room where she had been taken after collapsing on the grass outside. It seemed like an intrusion to join them,but, in truth, one more made no difference. She was motionless, legs bent below her red dress and head to one side. With the horror of a westerner used to ambulance sirens, I counted the seconds ticking away while nothing was done. No drip, no oxygen mask, no injections, no resuscitation. They had seen it too often before. They knew there was nothing they could do.

As a Café Sentido colleague reported, in reference to Ms. Bosely’s testimony:

[The patient] had been perfectly healthy and active just the day before. But once she went into labor, her situation, geographically and socio-economically, left her in peril. There is no doctor in her town. There are no doctors for over 20 miles. The town of Soroti, where she might find a hospital and a doctor, also has the nearest obstetrician.

Violence against women in Darfur continues to rage out of control. As this publication reported in late July:

Attitudes about violence against women in Darfur vary widely and are a source of high controversy in Sudan. Last year, at the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women, at the UN Headquarters in New York, a panel of women from the Sudanese parliament, headed by a female Sudanese doctor linked to the Khartoum government, gave a report on the status of violence against women in the Darfur conflict zone, in which rape was virtually ignored.

Though the presentation focused on rape as a form of violence against women, the reports of “confirmed cases”, based only on the cases the authorities both accepted as legitimate complaints and had successfully prosecuted, put the annual number of rapes for each of the three designated zones in Darfur in the single digits, even as NGOs and UN agencies were estimating figures, compiled from sporadic reports of cases never prosecuted, in the tens of thousands, including documentation of a deliberate campaign involving some government-backed forces.

But the failure to prosecute rape, or even to adequately treat rape victims or investigate reports of rape in the first place, is only part of the extreme violence that puts women in danger and threatens to keep the benefits of a full life engaged with society from them.

Failure to act to prevent forcible or coercive female circumcision and a refusal to treat cases of fistula, which is easily cured if treated early, cause women to endure not only physical trauma and ongoing disability, but also to be relegated to a lower level of social relevance. Providing even one trained physician for a remote village or over-stressed refugee camp can do a lot to prevent these kind of problems from crippling women or keeping them away from the public sphere.

Justice for women victimized by corruption, war and impunity, is of primary urgency for societies whose women are so extremely disadvantaged. Whether it is the inability of women to sue to hold onto family-owned land, to fight against powerful local leaders who commit crimes against them, including rape, theft, abduction and forcible indenture, securing women’s right to access the justice system, be treated as equals and enforce their rights before the law, is essential to healing communities, speeding their economic development and stabilizing political systems.

Economic rights that cannot be overlooked, include the right to own and inherit property, the right to fair pay or equal pay for equal work, the right to hold personal bank accounts, start businesses in their own name, and to secure microfinancing for their personal or business ventures. Extending each of these economic rights to women has repeatedly been shown to have a stabilizing effect on volatile regions and nations and to aid in economic development.

Key political rights that must be addressed are both women’s suffrage —which means examining and securing the voting rights of all citizens within a given country, so that women can be adequately assured of having equal, and verifiably so, access to the voting process— and women’s right to participate in electoral politics as candidates.

In Afghanistan, the plight of Malalai Joya is instructive. As reported by Café Sentido this June:

Malalai Joya is a pioneer in Afghan politics, one of the female members of Parliament, as of 2005, and a voice for women’s and human rights generally in a nation increasingly beleaguered by corruption, mass violence and social disintegration. Joya was stripped of her seat in parliament in 2007, in extralegal proceedings, for criticizing the warlords among her colleagues.

She now lives a nightmare of constant persecution, in which she is forced to change location nearly every night to avoid falling into the hands of those who threaten to kill her for speaking out. Joya says that Afghan democracy and the “voiceless” people of her country are engaged in an invisible and desperate struggle with enemies of her nation and her people, enemies of peace, like the Taliban leaders and warlords who seek to subjugate the population.

Joya’s own story of heroic advocacy and tragic persecution mirrors the situation in which Afghans find themselves generally, struggling to emerge from a reign of terror, in which fundamentalist militia attack schoolgirls by throwing acid on them and women are stoned simply for walking alone, even if covered from head to toe, in public.

But women also need to be protected from the evils of culturally rationalized shame-based killings, in which male family members murder their own female relatives in order to defend their “honor”. There is also the problem of shame-based torture, as in the case of a Sudanese law that subjects a woman to 40 lashes —a bloody and agonizing experience— for the crime of “harassment to the public sentiments”, committed by wearing full-length pants.

Such laws demean women and foster the ancient superstition that women should be treated as “unclean” or “sinful” and thus excluded from public life. They allow thugs and murderers to justify violent assaults against defenseless women and even young girls. And even where violence is absent, such beliefs help to preclude women’s accessing educational institutions or even learning to read and write.

And yet, in one after another country, it has been demonstrated that empowering poor women, through education, political rights and economic equality before the law, fosters political stability and economic advancement for their communities and for the society at large.

Defending women and girls against the very real evils of the human trafficking —i.e. modern slavery— underworld, working to prevent and to punish violence against women, and guaranteeing girls’ access to a full education, are must-do priorities for any society where poverty, political violence and tribalism threaten stability.

• Some reporting contributed by J.E. Robertson

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