VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN (2) - A REVIEW OF EXISTING DATA

Violence against Women is a manifestation of the historically unequal power relations between men and women. It has been noted that in all patriarchal societies violence has been used as the most powerful instrument for suppressing the rights of women as equal partners both within the family as well as in society at large.

VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN – A GLOBAL PHENOMENON 

According to a WHO study presented at Geneva; 52% of the women worldwide were physically assaulted by close male associates at least once in their lives. According to a WORLD BANK study domestic Violence Against Women accounted for 5% of the healthy years of working life lost in developing countries.

At least one out of every third women around the world has been beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused in her lifetime and in most of the cases abuser usually someone known to the victim. Violence against women and girls is a universal phenomenon. Perhaps the most pervasive human rights violation that we know today, it devastates lives, fractures communities, and stalls development.

The current day statistics paint a horrifying picture of the social consequences of violence against women. In the year 2002, the Council of Europe adopted a recommendation declaring violence against women a public health emergency, and a major cause of death and disability of age women 16 to 44 years. In one such report by World Bank, it was estimated that violence against women was as serious a cause of death and incapacity among women of reproductive age as cancer, and a greater cause of ill-health than traffic accidents and malaria combined. The cost involved is also considerably high, a report by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, 2003) estimates that the costs of intimate partner violence in the USA alone exceed $5.8 billion per year: 4.1 billion are for direct medical and health care services while productivity losses account for nearly $1.8 billion.

DOMESTIC AND SEXUAL VIOLENCE

Domestic and intimate partner violence involves physical and sexual attacks against women in the home, within the family or within an intimate relationship. Women are more at risk of experiencing violence in intimate relationships than elsewhere.

No country in the world is safe for women from this type of violence. Out of ten counties surveyed in a 2005 study of the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 50 percent of women in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Peru and Tanzania reported having been subjected to physical or sexual violence by intimate partners, with figures reaching staggering 71 percent in rural Ethiopia, with an exception to Japan where less than 20 percent of women reported incidents of domestic violence. An earlier study by the same organization recorded 30 percent women in the UK and 22 percent in the USA have experienced rather physically abused by their partners or ex-partners.

Based on several surveys from around the world it can be concluded that 50 percents of the women who die from homicides are killed by their current or former husbands or partners. Women are killed by people they know and die from guns violence, beatings and burns among numerous other forms of abuse. A study conducted in Sao Paulo, Brazil reported that 13 percent of deaths of women of reproductive age were homicides, of which 60 percent were committed by the victims’ partners.

In the USA, 700,000 women are raped or sexually assaulted each year, with 14.8 percent of women reported being raped before the age of 17. In a randomly selected study of nearly 1,200 ninth-grade students in Geneva and Switzerland; 20 percent of them revealed that they had experienced at least one incident of physical sexual abuse in their life.

HARMFUL TRADITIONAL PRACTICES

Harmful traditional practices refer to types of violence that have been committed against women in certain communities and societies. So long these abuses are considered a part of accepted cultural practice. These violations include female genital mutilation or cutting (FGM), dowry murder, so-called honour killings, and early marriage marriages. They lead to death, disabilities, and physical and psychological dysfunction for millions of women annually.

FEMALE GENITAL MUTILATION (FGM)

FGM refers to several types of surgeries performed traditionally on women and girls. Often part of fertility or coming-of-age rituals, FGM is sometimes justified as a way to ensure chastity and genital ‘purity’. The practice of FGM is prevalent in 25 African countries, among some minorities in Asia and immigrant communities in Europe, Australia, Canada and the US. An estimated 130 million women have undergone FGM, and an additional two million girls and women are being subjected to it each year. Since the late 1980s, opposition to FGM and efforts to combat the practice have increased. Some countries also have passed legislation to regulate or ban FGM. A joint initiative by UNICEF, WHO, and UNFPA seeks an enormous reduction in the incidence of FGM with an addition to assisting governments to develop and implement national polices to abolish the practice.

DOWRY MURDERS

Dowry murder is a brutal practice involving a woman being killed by her husband or in-laws because her family is unable to meet their monetary demands in the name of dowry. While custom of dowry or analogous payments are prevalent among all cultures throughout the world; dowry murder takes place predominantly in South Asia. In India, for example, there are close to 15,000 dowry deaths estimated per year and mostly in kitchen fires designed to look like accidents. In Bangladesh, there have been many incidents of acid attacks due to dowry disputes leading often to blindness, disfigurement, and death.

HONOUR KILLINGS

The practice of killing rape victims, suspected women who have engaged in premarital sex and accused women of adultery by their male relatives is predominant in many societies across the world as such violation of a woman’s chastity is viewed as an affront to the family’s honour.

According to a 2002 UN human rights report, every year in the name of honour more than 1,000 women are killed in Pakistan. In a study of female deaths in Alexandria, Egypt, 47 percent of the women were killed by a relative after the woman had been raped. In Jordan and Lebanon, 70 to 75 percent of the perpetrators of these so-called honour killings are the women's brothers. It is not only in Islamic countries that this act of violence is prevalent, but Brazil is cited as a case in point, where killing is justified to defend the honour of the husband in the case of a wife’s adultery.

EARLY MARRIAGES

The practice of early marriage of girl is striking throughout the world, but it is rampant in African and South Asian countries. This can considered as another form of sexual violence, as young girls are more often forced into marriage and an eventual sexual relations, which jeopardizes their health, raises their risk of exposure to HIV/AIDS and limits their chance of attending school.

Parents and families often justify child marriages to ensure a better future for their daughters. Parents and families get their younger daughters married as a means to gain economic security and status for them as well as for their daughters. Insecurity, social conflict and societal influence forces family members to get their daughters married at early ages. Kidnapping young girls is common practice in many African countries, where there is a higher incidence of ethnic violence and social conflict.

For example young girls are ‘sold’ by their parents into marriage for money in the North West Frontier Province in Pakistan. And in many cases this is done without the consent of daughters; and often the prospective bride grooms are wealthy but much older than bride. Though law does not permit this, but child marriages are still practiced. Girls fleeing from such marriages can be put in jail and are shunned by society. And even if they are released, they are either killed by their own family or their in-laws, or sold again.

TRAFFICKING OF WOMEN AND GIRLS

Trafficking involves recruiting or transporting another person in order to place them in a situation of abuse or exploitation such as forced prostitution, slavery-like practices, battering and extreme cruelty, sweatshop labour, or exploitative domestic servitude.

While exact data is hard to come by, estimates on the number of trafficked women and girls range from 700,000 to two million per year. More than 200,000 Bangladeshi women have been trafficked between1990 and 997; and 5000 to 7000 Nepali women and girls illegally trafficked to India. In Europe for example, 10 to 15 percent of foreign prostitutes in Belgium were trafficked from other countries and sold into prostitution rings. These women and girls were mainly from Central and Eastern Europe, Colombia, Nigeria and Peru. Illegal trafficking in persons frequently involves organized crime, and efforts to combat it can involve serious risks.

HIV/AIDS AND VIOLENCE

Women’s inability to negotiate safe sex and unwanted sex refusal is closely linked to the high prevalence HIV/AIDS. Sexual assault such as rape results in a higher risk of abrasion and bleeding, providing a ready avenue for transmission of the virus. Both realities obliterate women’s ability to protect themselves from infection.

Violence is a cause as well as a consequence of HIV/AIDS. For many women, the fear of violence prevents them from declaring their HIV-positive status and seeking help and treatment. They have been driven from their homes, left destitute, been ostracized by their families and community, and subjected to extreme physical and emotional abuse. In the year 1998 a women named Gugu Dhlamini from South Africa was stoned to death by men in her community, after she declared her positive status on radio and television on World AIDS Day.

Young women are particularly vulnerable to coerced sex and are increasingly being infected with HIV/AIDS. Over half of new HIV infections world-wide are occurring among young people between the ages of 15 to 24, and over 60 percent of HIV-positive youth between the ages of 15 to 24 are women. A study conducted in Tanzania in 2001 found that HIV-positive women were over 2 and half times more likely than HIV-negative women to have experienced violence perpetrated by their current partner.

CRIMES AGAINST WOMEN IN WAR AND ARMED CONFLICT

The victims in today’s armed conflicts are far more likely to be civilians than soldiers. Some 70 percent of the casualties in recent conflicts were non-combatants, most of them women and children. Women’s bodies have become part of the battleground for those who use terror as a tactic of war as they are raped, abducted, humiliated and made to undergo forced pregnancy, sexual abuse and slavery. In Rwanda, up to half a million women were raped during the 1994 genocide. The numbers are as high as 60,000 in the war in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Equally, in Sierra Leone, the number of incidents of war-related sexual violence among internally displaced women from 1991-2001 is as high as 64,000.

Protection and support for women survivors of violence in conflict and post-conflict areas is woefully inadequate. Access to social services, protection, legal remedies, medical resources, places of refuge is limited despite the valiant efforts of numerous local NGOs to provide assistance. A climate of impunity further exacerbates the situation, ensuring that perpetrators go unpunished and free to continue their acts of violence. It is glaringly evident that much further effort is needed from governments and the international community to strengthen procedures and mechanisms to investigate, report, prosecute and remedy violence against women.