NYT magazine on women in the developing world
Posted by thejoseithing on August 24, 2009
ひさしぶり～
To anyone who may still be checking this blog…
I’m sorry for being away for months; I was traveling a lot and busy at work over the summer.
I’ll get back to those questions on consent right away.
For now a post or two with some reading material, not all about Japan…
The New York Times Magazine did a special issue called Saving the World’s Women. I’m working through it, just got through the front-article, 7 pages packed with things people should know more about. Some generous excerpts to get you wanting to read the whole thing:
page 1:
IN THE 19TH CENTURY, the paramount moral challenge was slavery. In the 20th century, it was totalitarianism. In this century, it is the brutality inflicted on so many women and girls around the globe: sex trafficking, acid attacks, bride burnings and mass rape….
page 2:
Traditionally, the status of women was seen as a “soft” issue — worthy but marginal. We initially reflected that view ourselves in our work as journalists. We preferred to focus instead on the “serious” international issues, like trade disputes or arms proliferation. Our awakening came in China….
The massacre [of Tiananmen Square] claimed between 400 and 800 lives and transfixed the world; wrenching images of the killings appeared constantly on the front page and on television screens.
Yet the following year we came across an obscure but meticulous demographic study that outlined a human rights violation that had claimed tens of thousands more lives. This study found that 39,000 baby girls died annually in China because parents didn’t give them the same medical care and attention that boys received — and that was just in the first year of life. A result is that as many infant girls died unnecessarily every week in China as protesters died at Tiananmen Square. Those Chinese girls never received a column inch of news coverage, and we began to wonder if our journalistic priorities were skewed….
A similar pattern emerged in other countries. In India, a “bride burning” [murder of a woman by dousing in gasoline and setting on fire] takes place approximately once every two hours, to punish a woman for an inadequate dowry or to eliminate her so a man can remarry — but these rarely constitute news. When a prominent dissident was arrested in China, we would write a front-page article; when 100,000 girls were kidnapped and trafficked into brothels, we didn’t even consider it news….
page 3:
The global statistics on the abuse of girls are numbing. It appears that more girls and women are now missing from the planet, precisely because they are female, than men were killed on the battlefield in all the wars of the 20th century. The number of victims of this routine “gendercide” far exceeds the number of people who were slaughtered in all the genocides of the 20th century….
page 4:
….1 percent of the world’s landowners are women….
page 5:
Yet another reason to educate and empower women is that greater female involvement in society and the economy appears to undermine extremism and terrorism. It has long been known that a risk factor for turbulence and violence is the share of a country’s population made up of young people. Now it is emerging that male domination of society is also a risk factor; the reasons aren’t fully understood, but it may be that when women are marginalized the nation takes on the testosterone-laden culture of a military camp or a high-school boys’ locker room…. Indeed, some scholars say they believe the reason Muslim countries have been disproportionately afflicted by terrorism is not Islamic teachings about infidels or violence but rather the low levels of female education and participation in the labor force….
The rest of the article includes success stories of three remarkable individual women from Pakistan, India and Zimbabwe, more details on specific issues, and types of women-focused international aid that have been most effective.
Read the whole thing here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/magazine/23Women-t.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1#
