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Thursday, June 08, 2000
By Ann McFeatters, Post-Gazette National Bureau
Women: Work In Progress
UNITED NATIONS -- Awash in new reports detailing giant increases in population, an epidemic of AIDS cases and more trafficking in young women as sex slaves, many of the 12,000 women meeting at the United Nations special session to assess the progress of women in the last five years say they are getting discouraged.
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About 100 of them met yesterday afternoon to trade e-mails in a desperate effort to feel that they were accomplishing something by trying to set up their own network, worried that this may be the last big conference on women sponsored by the United Nations.
Leslie Wright, chair of the New York Commission on the Status of Women, organized the meeting since many women were kept out of closed-door sessions where a final document for the conference is being written. The document will make clear whether goals set five years ago in history's largest gathering of women at a U.N. conference in Beijing will be weakened at the demand of Islamic nations and the Vatican.
"There are a lot of women here who can't get into the United Nations because of the three-person limit per organization," Wright said.
Another problem has been that peripheral conferences being held in the United Nations complex that aren't part of the official special session by the U.N. General Assembly don't always have translators. It costs $300 an hour for a translator, and two are needed for each language for each hour. Groups of women silently going from conference to conference carry handwritten signs demanding, unsuccessfully, that "Espanol" (Spanish) be spoken.
Finally, the women who want to set up a network are frustrated that names of many attendees aren't released. That's because of the controversy over such issues as reproductive rights, Wright said.
"There could be harassment and reprisals against them when they get back home," she said, noting that it had happened to some women who a few months ago attended a preliminary meeting for this week's U.N. session.
While there has been progress on some fronts in the battles against problems that plague the world's women, such as higher marriage ages and more access to education for young girls, the problem of women in poverty is not improving and the outlook remains grim, according to new data. A new report released yesterday by the Population Reference Bureau said the world's population in many developing countries is growing faster than many hoped.
In 50 years, India is expected to have 1.6 billion people, followed by China with 1.3 billion, the United States with 404 million, Indonesia with 312 million, Nigeria with 304 million, Pakistan with 285 million, Brazil with 244 million, Bangladesh with 211 million, Ethiopia with 188 million and Zaire with 182 million.
But there is a strong move at the New York conference to delete a provision included in the Beijing conference's 150-page report on goals for gender equality that encourage sex education for school children and to dilute its encouragement of U.N. member nations to guarantee reproductive freedom to all women.
Armed with a petition that bore 30,000 American names, a group of conservative women called Concerned Women for America held a press conference saying the delegates to the U.N. conference representing the United States and other Western nations are working to undermine traditional values.
The conservative group said the U.S. delegation wants to "eliminate any limits on sexual activity by demanding that 'sexual rights' be considered 'human rights.'" It contended that "sexual rights ...could include pedophilia, fetishes or any activity that people could claim is sexually gratifying."
The group also opposes legalized abortion as well as government stipends for doctors who learn abortion procedures and argued that the pending U.N. consensus document for the conference, to be released tomorrow, would "infringe on national sovereignty, using the United Nations to overturn national laws and culture."
U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, who heads the U.S. delegation along with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (expected in New York today after returning home from Mideast diplomacy this week), said the conservative group's charges are "not true."
Another report released yesterday found that HIV/AIDS is spreading around the world faster than expected. For example, Africa, with 13 percent of the world's population, now has 69 percent of the world's HIV and AIDS cases. This troubles the women at the conference, particularly because there are now more women than men with AIDS, and thousands of babies are being born infected with AIDS.
The U.N. International Labor Organization yesterday said AIDS is spreading so fast, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, that it will reverse the economic progress in many of the poorest nations. The ILO said AIDS will reduce the size and quality of developing countries' labor force just when they need a vigorous one in such industries as transportation and mining to improve economic conditions.
And the ILO noted that in South Africa, nearly a third of companies have begun to reduce workers' benefits because of the costs incurred to treat those with HIV and AIDS.
But the women attending the conference did hail 27 countries' ratification yesterday in Geneva of a treaty banning exploitation of children who are forced to work. One of the ratifiers was the United States, which still has refused to ratify the Convention for the Elimination of All Discrimination Against Women -- a fact that is a source of anger to many attending delegates and representatives of non-governmental organizations.
With violence against women erupting as a major issue at the conference, the United States -- concerned that 45,000 women are working against their will as prostitutes in this country after being lured here by phone job offers -- announced this week that it is jointly sponsored a meeting with Ukraine later this month about the issue of trafficking in women.
The New York conference has drawn representatives of 800 women's organizations from North America, 800 from Europe, 600 from Asia, 500 from Africa, 300 from Latin America and 100 from the Middle East.
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.