Honor killings and dowry deaths

In many places around the world, if a woman diminishes the "honor" of her family, she must die or be viciously punished. Twenty-seven-year-old Samia Sarwar, for example, who lived in the Pakistani city of Lahore, was engaged in pressing for a divorce from her husband, an act that her family considered shamefully dishonorable and profoundly embarrassing to them. So her mother, father, and paternal uncle hired a hit man, who on April 6,1999, shot Sarwar dead in her lawyer's office.

Hundreds of such murders occur annually in Pakistan, where choosing a spouse is also viewed as a crime against family honor. Honor reprisals may take the form, in addition to murder, of beatings, rape, burning, acid attacks, and mutilation.

"Women in Pakistan," says Human Rights Watch, "face staggeringly high rates of rape, sexual assault, and domestic violence while their attackers largely go unpunished owing to rampant incompetence, corruption, and biases against women throughout the criminal justice system."

The same, however, could be said of dozens of other countries.

Dowry killings, on the other hand, occur largely on the Indian subcontinent (India, Pakistan and Bangladesh) and typically involve a newlywed bride who fails to produce a dowry sufficient to satisfy her husband and his family. The latter's only recourse, sanctioned by culture and tradition, is to do away with the hapless bride. The young groom then seeks a new one who has the means to bring him satisfactory honor and wealth.

Fueled by mushrooming consumerism, such dowry covetousness is estimated to kill one woman in India every six hours, often for a mere bicycle or television set, says Kirti Singh, a Supreme Court attorney from India. Police fail to view dowry killings as crimes.

According to the nongovernmental Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), dowry killings in that country "included driving a woman to suicide or engineering an “accident” (frequently the bursting of a kitchen stove) to cause her death... usually... when the husband, often in collaboration with his side of the family, felt that the dowry or other gifts he had expected from his
in-laws in consequence of the marriage were not forthcoming, or/and he wanted to marry again, or he expected an inheritance from the death of his wife." Of the 215 "stove-death" cases in Lahore alone in 1997, police follow-up was imperceptible and no one was convicted.

Spousal abuse.

A slew of sociological studies in various countries over the past decade has revealed a startlingly similar portrait of abuse of women by their husbands or boyfriends. Country after country, whether wealthy or poor, Christian or Muslim or Buddhist, majority black or brown or white, displays the same pattern of a disturbingly high rate of assault against women by their intimate companions. For example.

· At least 20 per cent of women say they have been physically abused by a male partner in the last 12 months in Australia, Chile, South Korea, Nicaragua, Peru, Rwanda, and the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

· At least 20 per cent of women say they have been physically assaulted by the man in their current relationship in India, Kenya, Thailand, and Uganda.

· At least 20 per cent of women say they have experienced physical abuse at some point in their lives by a male companion in Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, Chile, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey, Uganda, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

In addition, the United Nations Secretariat has compiled internal studies from yet other countries, publishing them in The World’s Women 1995, that sketch much the same picture.

A close cousin of physical violence against women is sexual violence. In the latter, a male companion forces his woman – through roughness, blows, threats, or weapon use – to have sex with him. Here again, serious scientific studies around the world show a pattern similar to that of physical abuse. While in a handful of nations and territories less than 10 per cent of women experienced sexual violence, in many others the rate was usually well over 20 per cent.

Akin to sexual violence is female genital mutilation (FGM). Although this is actually a cultural artifact common to many traditional societies in Africa and Asia, it is a form of violence against girls that affects their lives as adult women, making it difficult for them to appreciate the pleasure and joy of sexual intimacy with their husband.

According to the World Health Organization, FGM constitutes "all procedures that involve partial or total removal of the external female genitalia or other injury to the female genital organs whether for cultural or any other nontherapeutic reasons." Its goal is to ensure the self-respect of the girl on whom it is performed and to increase her marriage opportunities.

The practice, however, is officially condemned by more than 180 governments. It can cause severe and chronic health problems and can kill some young girls.

There are dozens of brush wars and small or large insurgencies around the world today, and the fact is that, whenever there is a war, women come out of it poorly. In the lawless environment of an armed conflict, females are routinely taken advantage of – raped, brutalized, or exploited. But none of these wars seems to be more broad and intense today than the conflict that subsumes all of them: the global war against women.

Washington Times National. Weekly edition. 2001

Gendercide: Killing Female Infants And Fetuses

In many countries around the world, an anti-female holocaust is occurring that has stunned neutral outside observers. It centers around the immolation of female fetuses and babies, a practice that's most widespread in India and China, the world's two most populous nations.

In the wake of the proliferation of ultrasound and amniocentesis techniques for prenatal sex determination, an estimated 2 million to 5 million female fetuses are destroyed every year in India. And countless newborn girls are killed, according to the Los Angeles Times John-Thor Dahlburg, by being fed dry, unhulled rice that punctures their windpipes, being made to swallow poisonous powdered fertilizer, or being smothered with a wet towel, strangled, or allowed to starve to death. The country’s gender imbalance has widened from 972 females for every 1 000 males in 1901 to 929 females per 1 000 males today.

According to Vinay Aggarwal, coordinator of the Indian Medical Association, the consequences for India are devastating. He points to the most recent census figures, which show that, in some parts of the nation, there were only 879 females for every 1 000 males. The biggest imbalances are reported in the wealthiest states, suggesting that poverty is not the prime determinant in the rejection of girls.

India's gender gap has led to the phenomenon of villages in the western state of Rajasthan, for example, in which there hasn´t been a wedding for years, because of a lack of brides.

Meanwhile, in China, more than 50 million women are estimated by, the World Health Organization to be “missing”, because of the ”institutionalized killing and neglect of girls” stemming from Beijing’s population control program, started in 1979, that limits parents to one child. Joseph Farah, of the Western Journalism Center, has called what is happening in China “the biggest single holocaust in human history.”

Peter Stockland, a writer for Canada's Calgary Sun, says, “Years of population engineering, including virtual extermination of “surplus” baby girls,
has created a nightmarish imbalance in China's male and female populations.” In fact, the relative decline in the number of Chinese women has led to a proliferation of “bachelor villages” around the huge country.

In 1999, Vancouver Sun reporter Jonathan Manthorpe wrote of a study by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences declaring that “the imbalance between the sexes is now so distorted that there are 111 million men in China – more than three times the population of Canada – who will not be able to find a wife.” As a result, kidnapping and slave-trading of women has skyrocketed, Manthorpe wrote in his story, titled “China Battles Slave Trading in Women: Female Infanticide Fuels a Brisk Trade in Wives.” “Since 1990, say official Chinese figures, 64 000 women – 8 000 a year on average – have been rescued by authorities from forced marriages,” Manthorpe reported. “The number who have not been saved can only be guessed at... The thirst for women is so acute that the slave trader gangs are even reaching outside China to find merchandise. There are regular reports of women being abducted in such places as northern Vietnam to feed the demand in China.”

Female infanticide and feticide stem from the low status women hold in patriarchal societies, which abound around the globe. Sons are viewed as assets and income providers, even by women, for they shoulder the brunt of the work in the fields. They are seen as a type of insurance, for they are relied upon to provide for their parents in their old age. In China, peasants smile upon a boy child, seeing in him the embodiment of a good pension, but baby girls are called “maggots in the rice.”

Women, on the other hand, do not possess the pluses men do. Moreover, in India, young ladies’ families must pay a dowry when they marry, an enormous sum that can often amount to 10 years of wages. It’s hardly surprising, then, that Indian parents cringe when a girl is born.

Washington Times National. Weekly edition. 2001

They'll never go home again

Why do women work? Many people seem to believe that women work because they have to. The economy is lousy, so it takes two incomes for a family to survive.

Other people seem to believe women work because our values are all screwed up. Our lust for material goods has driven Mom out into the workplace at the expense of a peaceful, balanced family life.

No wonder working women are filled with angst. They’re constantly told they’re supposed to feel guilty (for shortchanging their kids) or angry (at husbands who shirk their half of the housework). Every time they pick up a magazine they find yet another confessional tale by someone who’s ditched her glamorous, high-powered career to go back home and bake cookies for her neglected kids.

Contrary to the prevailing mythology, the real reasons women work have very little to do with need or greed. They work because they want to, and because they can.

Nearly every woman who works knows what she gets out of it: independence, self-esteem, a sense of competence. She gets the chance to choose her own life (and her own man, or no man). This is true whether she's a vice-president or a data-entry clerk, a sales manager or a telemarketer. Women have known forever that a pay cheque – a job of one's own – is the most powerful instrument of liberation there is.

The other liberating force is technology. It is controversial to say so, but technological advances have all but abolished housework. Women aren't needed at home any more because the job of housewife has ceased to exist.

As proof, I submit the household of my grandmother, circa 1935.

Grandma (who also had a job as a nurse) ran a typical house in a typical American town. Unlike many country people, her family had electricity, running water and indoor plumbing. They also had a modern stove, fuelled by gas rather than coal or wood. Even so, the house got dirty fast (no air filters) and was hard to clean (no vacuum cleaners.)

Running a house was full-time hard labour. Housewives made all the meals from scratch (no frozen food: no freezers). Grandma baked her own bread and cakes and, during the summer, fed the family from the vegetable garden. She got her eggs from the neighbour, who kept chickens. She kept the meat and milk in the icebox, which was serviced by a man in a horsedrawn cart. The food stayed as cold as the melting lump of ice.

In September, the family ate leftovers while Grandma spent a whole week preserving her peaches, tomatoes and beans. Back then, putting up food for the winter was not a lifestyle option.

Monday was washday. Grandma used a wringer washer and a washboard. Other families boiled their whites in a big tub in the back yard. (No detergent, no bleach. People used soapflakes.) After she wrang out the clothes, Grandma hung them on the line to dry. Plenty of families ate baked beans on Monday because the washing took all day.

Tuesday was ironing day. (Non-crease fabrics hadn’t been invented.) Some houses had a mangle for the sheets, but Grandma did them by hand. She took special care with Grandpa’s shirts. (He liked a clean, crisp, starched shirt every day.) Housewives without electricity did the job with flat irons heated on the stove. Women who did not wash on Monday and iron on Tuesday were thought to have something wrong with them.

Home was a dangerous place then. Beans, if not canned properly, gave your family ptomaine poisoning. Women got their arms caught in wringers and mangles. My mom was scalded once when a jar of boiling tomatoes exploded.

Grandma was an expert seamstress. She made all my mother's clothes and many of her own. She turned her husband’s shirt collars when they were frayed, and darned the family socks.

My mother tasted her first Birdseye frozen peas when she was eight. About that time, my grandmother acquired a Sunbeam Mixmaster. It was the beginning of the technological revolution that would sweep away the drudgery of a housewife’s life forever.

Processed food, refrigerators, microwave ovens and wash-and-wear fabrics have altered our world as profoundly as the automobile or the microchip. Today, any family can manage home-maintenance chores in an hour or two a day, and the only time it makes sense for a parent to stay home is when the kids are young. (Technology is not likely to abolish the need for parents.)

There are entire industries devoted to maintaining the illusion that homemaking is still a full-time job. Martha Stewart (the only individual who still keeps chickens) has turned it into an extravagant fantasy of pseudo-creative expression. And idle housewives can take their pick of dozens of made-up arts and crafts, from wreathmaking to decoupage. But it’s all pretend. The housewife’s job as we've known it for hundreds of years is gone for good – and good riddance.

That’s the real reason why women have gone out to work, and why they'll never go home again.

Dirk Comble. For a Change. 2001

There are really only two differences...

There are really only two differences between men and women that we know to be completely natural and unavoidable and that affect the jobs they do: men, on average, have stronger muscles than women; and women give birth to babies. All other differences that we may observe are increasingly held to be the result of training and fashion, and not something inborn and inevitable.

This means that the traditional role of women as housewives, who perform the tasks of cooking, bringing up children, cleaning etc. as against the male role of going out to work, looking after the money side, fighting for 'hearth and home', etc. are now often thought to be purely the result of custom: men may be just as good at looking after babies once they are born, doing the housework, and all the other things considered to be women's jobs in most countries today, and women may be just as good at earning the family's living, handling the accounts, fighting when necessary, and so on. Many men and women have proved that they can perform tasks traditionally reserved for the opposite sex.

If from their earliest years children see their mother doing one sort of work, and their father another; if they also see all their friends' parents having the same distribution of labour; and if little girls are encouraged to play with dolls, sew,
cook and avoid dirty and dangerous amusements, while their brothers are en­couraged to play with toy trains and toy soldiers, to make model aeroplanes, climb trees, play football, etc. they are being brainwashed into accepting that men and women have very different roles to play in society, and into believing that they have these different roles because each is more suited by nature to the one or the other.

In days gone by, and in some countries still, physical strength is important: if everything is made, farmed, mined, etc. by hand, and there is sometimes fighting to be done with primitive weapons, obviously the stronger one is, the better. But even in ancient times there were female fighters – the Amazons – who were very successful against men; and in countries like the USSR and Israel today, one finds a lot of women doing hard physical work, for example on railway tracks. In the USA women are trained to fight in the same way as the men, in the armed forces, and in the army especially.

But in any case in the modern world physical strength is far less important than it used to be. One needs strength to control four big horses pulling a carriage, but practically none to drive a modern motor-car with power-assisted steering and brakes. One needed a lot of strength to fight with a sword or spear, but a rifle, a machine-gun and a rocket-launcher need very little.

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