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Wednesday, June 07, 2000
By Ann McFeatters, Post-Gazette National Bureau
Women: Work In Progress
UNITED NATIONS -- While women are beginning to make progress in getting better jobs and health care, they are still the victims of violence at an "appalling" rate, according to new research and more than a dozen experts at a United Nations conference on women.
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While such customs as female genital mutilations and honor killings are gradually being reduced, women are still not safe in their own homes, according to the new U.N. study, based on 15 years of data compiled by the United Nations Development Fund for Women, or UNIFEM.
More than one out of five women (22 percent) are victims of physical violence from an intimate partner in the United States. In Turkey, that figure is 58 percent; in Kenya, 42 percent; in Canada, 29 percent; and in Mexico, 27 percent.
"Whether there is an [actual] increase or [just that] the silence has been broken, we don't know. But the figures are appalling," said UNIFEM Executive Director Noeleen Heyzer.
And while war crimes now cover rape, the numbers of women brutally raped and beaten by invading soldiers in war-ravaged regions around the globe are not declining, the report indicates.
The report's findings -- timed to coincide with this week's U.N. General Assembly's special session to assess progress toward gender equality in the five years since the world's largest meeting of women in Beijing -- were buttressed by panels of experts, who gave anecdotal evidence of women killed because their dowries were too small, widows who were burned to death and women repeatedly beaten by their husbands.
The conference in New York has drawn more than 12,000 women to discuss the status of women in 2000. At one point, Michael Kaufman, a Canadian, promoted his crusade to prompt men around the globe to wear white ribbons as a sign of their pledge of non-violence toward women. Then Hadja Mariama Bruce Aribot, Guinea's social affairs minister, reported that her country has a new law to stop genital mutilation.
But after they had noted such progress, an Indian woman in an orange sari grabbed a microphone to moan, "How will things change as long as men think they are our owners and have all the power over us?"
And Mufti Ziauddin, a Pakistani human rights lawyer, shrieked that there were 12 "honor killings" of women in his small district, and that "the [legal] doors are closed" to redress for many other victims of violence who survive. "The problem is Islam has its own way of life. It creates problems for the poor, the weak and the women," he said, adding that he has kept up his human rights fight nonetheless. "I may be weak in my muscles, but the blood in my veins is rich, and I can challenge any sons of any man who don't give the rights to my sisters."
The characterization of the Islamic religion as repressive to women angered Aicha Belarbi, state secretary of the Moroccan ministry of foreign affairs, who argued that such a view "is not true." She insisted that her country is making a "national campaign against violence against women."
So far this week, there have been dozens of meetings about women's concerns, most of them sprinkled with only a few men. "A conference on the problems of women attended only by women doesn't make sense," complained Eveline Herfskens, minister of development cooperation for The Netherlands.
But one panel, "the role of men and boys in ending gender-based violence," featured several men on the panel and was filled to capacity with hundreds of women. "I've never seen this room so full," said Richard Jolly, special adviser to the administrator of the U.N. Development Program.
Kenyan delegate Philip Thigo, a member of the youth caucus, said young men and women have more in common than they think and need to spend more time talking to each other about their problems. He said he had found that many young men are violent out of fear and insecurity about their manhood.
Uganda's Vice President Speciosa Kazibe, who is a medical doctor, said one problem that must be guarded against is that, in the crusade to raise the status of women, men aren't pushed aside. "We're not fighting to be above the men; we want to accept our share of the responsibility," she said. "In [school] exams now, Ugandan girls are beating the boys so badly, we could end up with boys who aren't men at all."
Norman Tjombe, who runs a legal assistance center in Namibia, said his country earlier this year had a conference for 250 men about violence against women and has found that the message is spreading that such violence is wrong. Recently, he said, there was a demonstration outside a jail where a sex offender was seeking bail.
"There is certainly light at the end of the tunnel, and I'm pretty certain there is not an oncoming train," Tjombe said. But Linda Tarr-Whelan, U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women, said she was worried that some countries aren't really interested in the problem of violence against women and may try to block the issue's inclusion in conference's consensus document being hammered out this week. "There are some representatives not really willing to look at [criminalizing] violence against women," she said.
As national delegates and representatives of various groups argue over whether much progress has been made toward gender equality, small groups of key participants have been attempting to thrash out that consensus for adoption by all delegates at the conference conclusion Friday. But they are running into major squabbles over specifics regarding such issues as what constitutes a family and whether reproductive rights should be included in the document. The Vatican and various Islamic countries, such as Iran and Sudan, are fighting behind closed doors to weaken the 150-page platform for action document that was adopted five years ago at the prior U.N. conference in Beijing.
"It is really important this week not to step back from anything we agreed to in Beijing," UNIFEM's Heyzer said. "These [conference consensus] documents, however, are for governments. We women don't need documents to get our lives together. We don't have to ask permission. Not any more."
Richard Holbrooke, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said the United States' message to the delegates is that they should not erode the progress made in Beijing by raising new arguments, such as linguistic nuances regarding reproductive rights. Holbrooke and others who spoke yesterday said the real issues that should be addressed are more economic progress and more education for women.
Lt. Gen. Christon Tembo, Zambia's vice president, and Vilma Espin Guillois, a Cuban delegate, vigorously agreed. Globalization is leaving behind too many women in their countries, they said, and too many of their women live on $1 a day or less.
The series continues 
A Work In Progress
The Post-Gazette today continues to look at how women's lives have changed -- for better or worse -- in a dozen key categories identified at a U.N.-sponsored conference in Beijing five years ago.