One in Three Women

By Azar Majedi

Today all speakers talked about honour crimes as a widespread form of violence against women. What bewilders me is the name given to this horrendous crime: honour. Honour has a very positive connotation. Regardless of one’s world outlook and beliefs, the word honour has a good ring to one’s ear. When you hear this word, you fill up with positive and good feelings. The combination of these two completely opposite concepts to describe one phenomenon brings a lot of contradictions and confusion: “honour crimes!”

I have given this phenomenon a great deal of thought. I posed this question: Why is this brutal act being described so positively? After reflecting on this issue for some time, I came to see a pattern. It is like crimes committed under the name of patriotism and nationalism. The more you kill, the more brutal you become, the more heroic your status. This is exactly the same. The more inhuman you become under the name of misogyny, the more elevated your status among the community.

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RomeConference, 2008

By Azar Majedi

On Saturday May 31 and Sunday June 1 Casa Internazionale Delle Donne (the International House of Women) in Rome was host to a great conference, entitled “Feminists for a Secular Europe”, organised by European Feminist Initiative. The theme of the conference was to build a secular Feminist Europe which respects human equal rights and dignity and freedom. More than 100 activists from France, Italy, Poland, Sweden, Germany, Croatia, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria, Jordan, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon and Iran took part in this historical event.

The participants were all activists or representatives of different organisations working for women’s rights, human rights and secularism and campaigning to make the world a more humane and better place to live. They had come to Rome to build new movement together. They were all focused and determined. They had an important goal and an inspiring vision. They all were eager to push this new campaign forward. Two days of heated debates, passionate discussions and comradeship brought enormous energy into the movement. A strong feeling of solidarity was present at all times.

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“A crime against women, a crime against wives. When the one you love commits an act of sexual violence against you, the scars lie deep and buried.”

BY LOUISE MCORMOND-PLUMMER

In 1987, I became free of a relationship that almost cost me my life. For two years, I had lived with a man who thought love equaled ownership, and who retaliated brutally when challenged. He had beaten me, threatened me with weapons, and terrorized me in other ways. Other things had happened in that relationship, too. This man forced sex on me many times, as punishment for his jealousy, when he needed to assert power, or just because I said no. Though it was the threats to my life that seemed most frightening at the time, I was not to realize until years later the severe damage inflicted by the sexual abuses. And I knew that even had I wanted to admit what happened or say that it hurt, I would get little empathy. It couldn't have done me any real harm - hadn't I willingly been in his bed? And didn't that imply unlimited consent? No, it was not real rape and my pain was not real pain. I had internalized the myth that "real" rape is committed by men with hairy palms and glazed expressions lurking in alleyways.

Nevertheless, some time after leaving, I began to seek new ways of making sense of my experiences. In studying partner rape, I found out how shockingly prevalent it is. Researchers have been telling us this for twenty years:

“A 1985 study estimated that 10 to 14 per cent of married women have been or will be raped by their spouses.¹

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Cambodian Acid Violence against Women

By

William Grut, MD, Rose Charities

Acid violence defies any bounds of comprehension. It is a violation born and nurtured in hell itself, a pitiless, hideous evil. It takes away both skin and flesh and the very soul of the victim. And it does so with finality that is often absolute.

As a physician, I saw my first acid violence injury around 10 years ago. I had set up Rose charities as an extension of my previous organization, Project Iris. Iris dealt with eye injury and sight restoration but so many injuries extended beyond the eye to the face and torso. Rose went beyond the eye to facial and other injuries. Word had gone around that there were “foreign doctors” helping the injured and had set up a simple operative and treatment clinic on the outskirts of Phnom Penh.

My First Case of Acid Violence Against Women:

My first experience with this heinous manifestation of violence against women remains seared in my memory. I came in in the morning and she was there in the waiting area, brought in by a friend. She sat there on the hard wooden bench. I took her hand. She could not cry, she had no tear ducts since the skin fused tightly over where here eyes may or may not lie underneath. She just gazed forward; her skin mottled leather membrane, shrink-wrapped; her face no longer with any elasticity or ability to display any expression. Her name is Vanna.

Vanna had been beautiful, and for many poor, oppressed Cambodian women it is their only possession of value. Before becoming a victim, she had a low paying job in a restaurant. She had a boyfriend. The story goes: One day Vanna refused the advances of a much older man, a government official of some importance. Later that evening two men were waiting for her. They held her down and slowly poured the acid on her beautiful face. And then they continued to hold her while it did its work.

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One in Three© JOINS THE IN THE RESPONSE TO A STUDY ON GLOBAL PEACE THAT EXCLUDES VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN AS ONE OF ITS TWENTY-FOUR INDICATORS OF PEACE.

There is little debate anymore about the prevalence of men’s violence against women (VAW) in the world. Gender-based violence is a worldwide epidemic and shows up in crime data as high percentages of assault crimes, rapes, and murders. Decades of research also confirms that much violence against women is not reported and many governments do not document it, and those are two important factors in tracking prevalence. Plain and simple, violence against women and the impact on women’s lives around the world are largely ignored; behaviors are tolerated and viewed as norms, and policy makers, legislators, leaders of institutions, and most men stay uniformed, often ignorant of the problem. Sadly, because of this many women internalize much abuse and stay silent for years. Thankfully, their voices are being captured more and more, and the true scope of the problem has come to light; there is more research, more improvements to systems where women seek help, and an encouraging and growing worldwide movement of men organizing against VAW.

Now we have the Global Peace Index (GPI), an index developed to measure peace. In our view, this is forward thinking, progressive, and a good direction for what should be measured, except for one ghastly oversight. There is no index, or accounting, for men’s violence against women. Recently published as “a groundbreaking milestone in the study of peace,” and using twenty-four (24) indicators, the GPI is the first-ever study to rank countries according to their level of peacefulness.

How is this possible? Peace in the world cannot truly be measured when violence perpetrated against women by men is omitted. And what does not using an undeniably epidemic level of VAW and children as a factor of measurement in this study say about how invisible this oppression actually is? In fact, we could find no mention of VAW anywhere on the GPI Web site.

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