As Amanda notes below, today is International Women’s Day. If you pour through the print edition of the paper of record this morning, you’ll find Maureen Dowd’s magnum opus on Denis Collin’s green Eddie Bauer sportsjacket. But, you won’t find one word written about the the UN’s annual event. If you google-news in search of other US media coverage, you’ll find little more than press release-based wire copy.
If you believe as I do, that the rise of religious fundamentalism is one of the greatest threats of the 21st Century and that understanding the changing role of women in cultures across the globe is the key to understanding and combating the rise of fundamentalism, then you might find this lack of coverage disconcerting.
Oh, well. Maybe someone in MSM will catch on by 2008.
In their call for ending impunity for violence against women and girls, the UN provides a snapshot of the status of women:
* Violence against women is the most common but least punished crime in the world.
* It is estimated that between 113 million and 200 million women are demographically “missing.” They have been the victims of infanticide (boys are preferred to girls) or have not received the same amount of food and medical attention as their brothers and fathers.
* The number of women forced or sold into prostitution is estimated worldwide at anywhere between 700,000 and 4,000,000 per year. Profits from sex slavery are estimated at seven to twelve billion US dollars per year.
* Globally, women between the age of fifteen and forty-four are more likely to be maimed or die as a result of male violence than through cancer, malaria, traffic accidents or war combined.
* At least one out of every three women has been beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused in her lifetime. Usually, the abuser is a member of her own family or someone known to her. Domestic violence is the largest form of abuse of women worldwide, irrespective of region, culture, ethnicity, education, class and religion.
* It is estimated that more than two million girls are genitally mutilated per year, a rate of one girl every fifteen seconds.
* Systematic rape is used as a weapon of terror in many of the world’s conflicts. It is estimated that between 250,000 and 500,000 women in Rwanda were raped during the 1994 genocide.
* Studies show the increasing links between violence against women and HIV and demonstrate that HIV-infected women are more likely to have experienced violence, and that victims of violence are at higher risk of HIV infection.
17 Responses to “A snapshot of the status of women”
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Thanks, Roxanne. I went to the NY Times to look for coverage and was sad to see that no one did anything. Is Kristof still around? Sadly, the two people I look to for genuinely pro-woman writing in the Times are men—Kristof and Herbert. Given how horribly sexist the paper is, I suppose that it follows that women who write need to avoid genuine concern about very real issues lest they get edged out.
To be fair, the NYT featured a cover package on the Korean sex slaves the Japanese had during WWII
With a link this time!
My colleague Solana Larsen is covering the UN Commission on the Status of Women in our blog “women UNlimited” for openDemocracy.net.
Coverage in the UK has been better. See today’s Independent, for instance:
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/article2338425.ece
Does “Demographically Missing” include sex-selective abortion or only infanticide? Just curious, I keep reading news about “girl deficits” in China and India.
On the “comfort women” coverage in the NYT, they’d be remiss not to have prominently featured it, since Abe seemed to be retracting the quasi-offical quasi-apology that a Japanese official had made in 1993–and then was forced to retract his retraction after an international outcry, especially from places that fell under Japanese imperialism in the first half of the 20th C, which prominently featured testimony from surviving comfort women. So it was as much an international politics story–and a domestic politics one, given Honda’s resolution calling for an official apology from Japan–as a feminist one. Which is a good thing. Not as good as covering Japanese reactions today to the presence of US military bases and actions of their personnel, attitudes toward the surviving Japanese women the defeated Japanese government encouraged to become prostitutes to American soldiers in the early years of the US occupation (cf. John Dower’s Embracing Defeat for the history), the status of immigrant women in Japan, debates over women’s changing roles within Japan (given the declining birthrate and all), and so on–and doing the same kind of blanket coverage for 30 other countries each day for the next month, in a way that avoids the colonialist “white men are saving brown women from brown men” trope, avoids the sexist “U.S. women don’t know how great they’ve got it” trope, and all the other cliches of corporate media coverage of femnist issues. What would it take for that kind of thing to become the norm in the US media (rather than all AnnaParisNicoleBritney all the time)?
well, ehem, in my own blog of record, you’d find I kicked in my slant on the bizarre posture of the state of women a day early. Statistics don’t lie. Just the people who compile and quote them.
[don’t mind me, I am just timing the delay of the comment moderation machine here at Pandagon]
What would it take for that kind of thing to become the norm in the US media (rather than all AnnaParisNicoleBritney all the time)?
Proof that said coverage is profitable.
Well, for what it’s worth, my wife actually dug up something about women’s history month, which I’ve doing my own little bits on. Haven’t heard about it anywhere else, tho.
I first learned about International Women’s Day 7 years ago, when I was in Italy. I’ve barely heard about it since then, and it makes me just furious, because to me, ignoring it so neatly encapsulates the US view of women’s rights, just something for us individuals to worry about, no real need for any organization, let alone the media, to worry their precious little minds about.
(Apologies if this double-posts, but I’m having ‘net problems and needing to reload lots of pages.)
To be fair, its never been celebrated in the U.S. because its a Socialist holiday and is primarily celebrated in Communist and former Communist countries. Its certainly a worthy idea to set aside a day to celebrate and recognize women, but I think its not fair to berate the media for failing to cover it without noting the historic reasons that it never took hold in the U.S.
International Women’s Day…
In honor of International Women’s Day, we take a look at coverage of women from around the globe. Have an IWD-related post or story to share? Link to it in the comments section! For starters, InternationalWomensDay.com provides some historical……
You might be interested to know that women in China get a half day (or full day, depending on occupation) off work for International Women’s Day.
I have no news source on this for you - it was discovered through a business phone call to China yesterday evening. On the other hand, here in Canada, our boss bought the lab doughnuts in celebration.
Note that both the Chinese and Canadian women both work for the same company.
International Women’s Day is HUGE in west africa. I lived in Burkina Faso for 3 years and the President makes a national address, all the women buy new outfits and have big parties - even out in the villages. Not sure how much difference it makes, given, amonst other things, that their FGM rates are astronomical…
David N Scott
I’ve been writing about Women’s History Month (that’s just in the US, from what I can tell - I know the Canadian one is in October. Darn, I guess I’ll just have to write about women’s history twice this year!) in my Blog (link should be with my name if you want to check it out).
I was *told* that International Women’s Day used to be some sort of big deal here in Aus (my co-worker told me she used to get balloons and stuff on it?) but that it’s gone to the wayside.
As an interesting aside, when I tried to write about Violence against Women on Valentine’s Day, I was told I was promoting intolerance and ruining a holiday that was supposed to be about love between the sexes (no, really, that’s what I was told).
Today, I made a post daring the people who tell me constantly “but sexism happens to men too!” to write about it rather than tell *me* to write about it.
Strangely, they’ve been silent.
Happily, my *other* post for Blog Against Sexism Day is actually about Women’s History. *grin*
Actually I was on all day yesterday and, as my homepage is Yahoo, I saw links to articles about the day and what was happening all over the world from around noon on. The Associated Press, cnn, and definitely the NYTimes did have pieces about IWD. You just weren’t looking in the right places.