A War on Women
Feb. 17th, 2008 02:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stinglikeabeeFrom the LA Times Opinion section, written by Ann Jones. The article 'A War On Women' presents another battleground mainstream news organisations have failed to highlight - that of West Africa. Specifically, the countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Cote d'Ivoire which have recently seen horrendous warfare. Jones exposes the fate of women during these conflicts - rapes, murders, and torture - and the attitude of the men who have committed these acts. Chillingly she includes the snippet of an interview for a tv documentary with a guerilla, who uses the phrase 'made love' to describe what he did with the women, and when they fight him '...I call my friends to help me'. Even though the guerilla admits these were rapes, these happen during wartime and once the fighting is over he will not do it anymore.
Jones posits: During recent years, every kind of horror has been inflicted on girls and women in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast because they are female. If females were a particular ethnic group -- Albanians, let's say, or Tutsis -- or if they espoused a particular religion, as did Bosnian Muslims, we would recognize what goes on as a kind of "gender cleansing" or mass femicide. But we don't speak of crimes against women in that way. When did you last hear someone speak of "crimes against women" at all?
She's right. When I was in my college's Model United Nations, I was disturbed to learn the United States had not ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. Other countries that had problems with the text included the Netherlands and Islamic countries. If a woman's basic rights are ignored, what hope is there in preventing violence against her?
Jones posits: During recent years, every kind of horror has been inflicted on girls and women in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast because they are female. If females were a particular ethnic group -- Albanians, let's say, or Tutsis -- or if they espoused a particular religion, as did Bosnian Muslims, we would recognize what goes on as a kind of "gender cleansing" or mass femicide. But we don't speak of crimes against women in that way. When did you last hear someone speak of "crimes against women" at all?
She's right. When I was in my college's Model United Nations, I was disturbed to learn the United States had not ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. Other countries that had problems with the text included the Netherlands and Islamic countries. If a woman's basic rights are ignored, what hope is there in preventing violence against her?
