LAST week, the world celebrated International Women's Day and reviewed the condition of women in different parts of the world and the kind of progress achieved towards gender equality and empowerment of women. To one's astonishment, different reports on the condition of women throughout the world proved they continue to face traditional problems, 15 years after the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action was endorsed by most countries of the world during the Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in 1995. The adverse condition of women is not limited to a certain nation or to a specific part of the world. Developing countries, with their different religious and social backgrounds, continue to record the highest rate of discrimination against women. At the same time, other world countries still continue to also complain of the high rate of violence against women and some discrimination between males and females workers in respect of salaries and positions. However, the condition of women is still much worse in the Southern Hemisphere, where most of the poor and developing countries are located. The UN Development Programme (UNDP), addressing the condition of women in Asia, has recently revealed one of the most worrying aspects of gender discrimination, mainly in India and China. The UNDP report has revealed that Asia has the highest male-female sex ratio at birth in the world, with 119 boys born for every 100 girls. This might not seem a crime or a kind of injustice against women if had not occurred as a result of discriminatory healthcare and social systems. When the respective populations of these two countries exceeded one billion, they followed family planning systems to help lessen the high rate of growth. China implemented the general policy of one child per couple, while India, although it did not pursue such a rigid rule, still promoted reducing the number of the children born to a couple to a maximum of two. With the progress of healthcare and the technological ability to determine the gender of the foetus in its early months, coupled with the male preference in these societies, female foetuses are subjected to severe discrimination by being clinically aborted soon after they were conceived. Accordingly, more than 85 million foetuses were aborted last year in these two countries because of their gender. Although a Muslim country that bans abortion, the condition of women in Pakistan is not any better, if not even worse. In addition to discrimination against women and girls in respect of work, education and freedom to choose their husbands, Pakistani women are subjected to a high rate of domestic violence at the hands of their spouses. Amnesty International recently reported that 70 per cent of women in the world have experienced physical violence in their homes, while many more are victims of verbal abuse. In Pakistan, however, the condition might seem more critical, as the Pakistani newspaper The Dawn recently reported. In a column published in the newspaper on March 10, the writer, Zubeida Moustafa, was the most under-reported crimes in Pakistan. “According to the information provided by the Pakistan government to the UN secretary-general's database on violence against women, only 2,183 cases of domestic violence were reported in 2008, of which 1,005 [women] were murdered.” The writer cited the example of a woman called Nurjehan and affirmed the presence of many cases like her in Pakistan, who had lost their lives because of this domestic violence. “Ever since she was married, Nurjehan was beaten regularly by her husband until she could take it no more and escaped to her parents,” the writer recounted. “Her husband took her refusal to submit to his brutality as an act of dishonour. She had to return home after what was described as a ‘reconciliation'. But the very next day Nurjehan's bruised body was found in her bedroom. She had been strangled to death and the family was missing. “Could this tragedy have been prevented?” wondered Zubeida Moustafa. “Of course it could …quot; but only if we had been willing to break the silence thatshrouds domestic violence,” she noted. Violence against women and girls is a global pandemic, with up to 70 per cent of women experiencing violence in their lifetime. The problem remains universal, with women and girls affected by violence in every region and every country. Together with this crime there are still many discriminatory procedures practised against women in different parts of the world. These include preventing women from having access to decent work and senior positions such as the case in Egypt these days when a prestigious judicial authority, The State Council, recommended barring women from the position of judges. The heated debate, still being ignited in the country by activists, liberals and feminist groups, still falls short of expressing the real problems that the majority of women continue to suffer in Egypt. It is true we should ensure that educated women have the right to have access to different jobs on an equal footing with men and be valued according to their education and potential. However, we should not neglect the much larger proportion of Egyptian women living in the rural region, who continue to be deprived of basic education rights and paid work. Notably, the same anger against the phenomenon of under-age marriage prevails in the village as elsewhere in Egypt. Despite the issuing of much legislation to ban the marriage of girls under age of 18, hundreds of thousands of various violations are occurring in this field. One of these is to conduct an orfi (customary) ‘unregistered marriage' for a young girl until she reaches the legal marriageable age of 18, after which her marriage is registered in state documents. In the meantime, children born of thismarriage are not registered and cases of divorce always come at the cost of the woman's rights. In every society women continue to suffer different cases of discrimination; reform of women's condition should not start from the top but from the bottom to reflect throughout the entire society. In other words, we should focus not so much on ensuring women's rights to senior positions, such as prime minister or president, especially in a developing country, as this hardly mirrors the status of women being upgraded throughout society. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh could be cited as examples where women were accepted as a prime minister or a president in the second half of the 20th century. Nevertheless, women in these countries continue to suffer apparent discrimination depriving them from education, work, living in dignity and sometimes the right of life itself. Dear readers are invited to contribute their comments, views and questions via 111-115 Ramsis St., Cairo or e-mail: ([email protected])
