Women's Rights

[Guest guest]

http://www.hrw.org/women/

 

Millions of women throughout the world live in conditions of abject

deprivation of, and attacks against, their fundamental human rights

for no other reason than that they are women.

 

Combatants and their sympathizers in conflicts, such as those in

Sierra Leone, Kosovo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan,

and Rwanda, have raped women as a weapon of war with near complete

impunity. Men in Pakistan, South Africa, Peru, Russia, and Uzbekistan

beat women in the home at astounding rates, while these governments

alternatively refuse to intervene to protect women and punish their

batterers or do so haphazardly and in ways that make women feel

culpable for the violence. As a direct result of inequalities found in

their countries of origin, women from Ukraine, Moldova, Nigeria, the

Dominican Republic, Burma, and Thailand are bought and sold,

trafficked to work in forced prostitution, with insufficient

government attention to protect their rights and punish the

traffickers. In Guatemala, South Africa, and Mexico, women's ability

to enter and remain in the work force is obstructed by private

employers who use women's reproductive status to exclude them from

work and by discriminatory employment laws or discriminatory

enforcement of the law. In the U.S., students discriminate against and

attack girls in school who are lesbian, bi-sexual, or transgendered,

or do not conform to male standards of female behavior. Women in

Morocco, Jordan, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia face government-sponsored

discrimination that renders them unequal before the law - including

discriminatory family codes that take away women's legal authority and

place it in the hands of male family members - and restricts women's

participation in public life.

 

Abuses against women are relentless, systematic, and widely tolerated,

if not explicitly condoned. Violence and discrimination against women

are global social epidemics, notwithstanding the very real progress of

the international women's human rights movement in identifying,

raising awareness about, and challenging impunity for women's human

rights violations.

 

We live in a world in which women do not have basic control over what

happens to their bodies. Millions of women and girls are forced to

marry and have sex with men they do not desire. Women are unable to

depend on the government to protect them from physical violence in the

home, with sometimes fatal consequences, including increased risk of

HIV/AIDS infection. Women in state custody face sexual assault by

their jailers. Women are punished for having sex outside of marriage

or with a person of their choosing (rather than of their family's

choosing). Husbands and other male family members obstruct or dictate

women's access to reproductive health care. Doctors and government

officials disproportionately target women from disadvantaged or

marginalized communities for coercive family planning policies.

 

Our duty as activists is to expose and denounce as human rights

violations those practices and policies that silence and subordinate

women. We reject specific legal, cultural, or religious practices by

which women are systematically discriminated against, excluded from

political participation and public life, segregated in their daily

lives, raped in armed conflict, beaten in their homes, denied equal

divorce or inheritance rights, killed for having sex, forced to marry,

assaulted for not conforming to gender norms, and sold into forced

labor. Arguments that sustain and excuse these human rights abuses -

those of cultural norms, " appropriate " rights for women, or western

imperialism - barely disguise their true meaning: that women's lives

matter less than men's. Cultural relativism, which argues that there

are no universal human rights and that rights are culture-specific and

culturally determined, is still a formidable and corrosive challenge

to women's rights to equality and dignity in all facets of their lives.

 

The Women's Rights Division of Human Rights Watch fights against the

dehumanization and marginalization of women. We promote women's equal

rights and human dignity. The realization of women's rights is a

global struggle based on universal human rights and the rule of law.

It requires all of us to unite in solidarity to end traditions,

practices, and laws that harm women. It is a fight for freedom to be

fully and completely human and equal without apology or permission.

Ultimately, the struggle for women's human rights must be about making

women's lives matter everywhere all the time. In practice, this means

taking action to stop discrimination and violence against women.