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Raping mothers for a good cause [Trigger Warning]

October 6, 2010 by Peter · Leave a Comment 

First, a few recent posts for context:

On human violence
No justice on earth until there is justice for women
Is there anything more cowardly and despicable than a gang of armed men raping a woman?
Gallup polls the scourge of rape in Africa, but it’s not just an Africa problem

We speak about rape as a statistic, but here are the men who do it and the loathsome rationalizations for their cowardly acts (via Conflict Health and Penelope Chester):

Filed under JUSTICE, RIGHTS, WAR, WOMEN · Tagged with , ,

Child bride horrors last a lifetime

October 1, 2010 by Peter · Leave a Comment 

CNN:

A prominent Yemeni human rights activist, Amal Albasha, is outraged the practice continues. Her organization, Sisters Arab Forum, tries to intervene on behalf of child brides, to stop the marriages from taking place. Albasha added that nothing will change until people in Yemen try to fully understand the horror a child bride goes through. “You know, just two days ago, a 9-year-old girl got married in Taiz.” she said. “Just think about the pain, the fear — just think about a 9-year-old with a 50-year-old in a closed room,” said Albasha. “The experience remains until the day of death.”

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What kind of creature rapes children?

September 8, 2010 by Peter · Leave a Comment 

In a post on violence, I wrote:

The World Health Organization’s World Report on Violence and Health estimates that over a million people lose their lives to violence and millions more are injured and maimed every year. The report states that violence is “among the leading causes of death among people aged 15-44 years worldwide, accounting for 14% of deaths among males and 7% of deaths among females.”

What’s so disturbing is the myriad forms this violence takes and how deeply pervasive and borderless it is. Across the globe and across the centuries, humans have committed the most barbaric acts, limited only by their imaginations, and the march of civilization has done little to change the grim reality that on any given day, in every corner of our planet, gruesome and ungodly things are done to women, children and men.

Reading reports about children raped in Congo, I can’t fathom what kind of creature rapes anyone, let alone children.

Who does things like this:

A Jamaican taxi driver has been accused of raping a 12-year-old girl and then burying her alive after he thought he had strangled her to death, authorities said on Wednesday.

Or this:

Jessica Marie Lunsford was a nine-year-old girl who was abducted from her home in Homosassa, Florida in the early morning of February 24, 2005. Believed held captive over the weekend, she was raped and later murdered by 47-year-old John Couey who was living nearby.

Or this:

Marc Clifton Bryant, a Utah fugitive who was convicted after torturing a 16 year old girl with a blowtorch and screwdriver while he raped her, has been captured. Bryant was convicted in April on charges of aggravated kidnapping, child abuse, criminal solicitation, rape of a minor and making terroristic threats. Investigators say Bryant handcuffed a 16-year-old girl to a bed, raped her, tortured her with a blowtorch and scarred her with a heated screwdriver.

Individuals who commit these evil acts are not human. They are beyond description. Heinous beyond words.

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Gallup polls the scourge of rape in Africa, but it’s not just an Africa problem

September 2, 2010 by Peter · Leave a Comment 

Staggering numbers from Gallup’s poll:

Majorities in nearly all 18 sub-Saharan African countries surveyed in 2009 say rape is a major problem in their countries. A median of 77% of sub-Saharan Africans see rape as this much of a problem, but in six countries, the percentage saying this reaches 90% or higher.

Gallup’s survey results reaffirm the extent to which the issue of rape plagues countries in sub-Saharan Africa, including South Africa, where nearly all (97%) call it a major problem. According to Interpol, South Africa has the highest number of declared rapes in the world, with nearly half of the victims younger than 18.

The sexual violence in Congo alone should provoke a global outcry – that it doesn’t is one of the great travesties of our time.

And let’s not pretend rape isn’t an epidemic here in the US:

According to the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey — the country’s largest and most reliable crime study — there were 248,300 sexual assaults in 2007 (the most recent data available).

There are 525,600 minutes in a non-leap year. That makes 31,536,000 seconds/year. So, 31,536,000 divided by 248,300 comes out to 1 sexual assault every 127 seconds, or about 1 every 2 minutes.

I maintain that the world will not be a just or civilized place until the wholesale oppression of women and girls is brought to an end.

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Is there anything more cowardly and despicable than a gang of armed men raping a woman?

August 25, 2010 by Peter · Leave a Comment 

I witnessed terrible bloodshed in Lebanon, so I’m very accustomed to man’s capacity for barbarity. Still I’m at a loss for words to describe the cowardice and abject monstrosity of a gang of armed men raping a woman:

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Conflict minerals: the deadly serious outcome of our addiction to electronics

August 25, 2010 by Peter · 1 Comment 

Anyone using a cell phone or laptop should be required to watch this:

More on Congo’s sexual violence plague:

Filed under TECH, WAR, WOMEN · Tagged with , , , , , ,

No justice on earth until girls are free from these horrors

August 24, 2010 by Peter · Leave a Comment 

There is no graver (self-imposed) risk to human existence than the ravaging of our planet and there is no greater outrage on our planet than the wholesale oppression of girls and women.

I defy you to listen to these stories without getting overwhelmed with horror and anger:

And if that wasn’t enough, read these examples of what girls and women endure every day and let the anguish sink in:

This:

Denis Mukwege, a Congolese gynecologist, cannot bear to listen to the stories his patients tell him anymore. Every day, 10 new women and girls who have been raped show up at his hospital. Many have been so sadistically attacked from the inside out, butchered by bayonets and assaulted with chunks of wood, that their reproductive and digestive systems are beyond repair. “We don’t know why these rapes are happening, but one thing is clear,” said Dr. Mukwege, who works in South Kivu Province, the epicenter of Congo’s rape epidemic. “They are done to destroy women.”

Or this:

13-year old Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow was stoned to death in Somalia by insurgents because she was raped. Reports indicate that she was raped by three men while traveling by foot to visit her grandmother in Mogadishu. When she went to the authorities to report the crime, they accused her of adultery and sentenced her to death. Aisha was forced into a hole in a stadium of 1,000 onlookers as 50 men buried her up to the neck and cast stones at her until she died. A witness who spoke to the BBC’s Today programme said she had been crying and had to be forced into a hole before the stoning, reported to have taken place in a football stadium. … She said: ‘I’m not going, I’m not going. Don’t kill me, don’t kill me.’ “A few minutes later more than 50 men tried to stone her.” The witness said people crowding round to see the execution said it was “awful”.

Or this:

According to the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, women experience about 4.8 million intimate partner-related physical assaults and rapes every year. According to the National Crime Victimization Survey, which includes crimes that were not reported to the police, 232,960 women in the U.S. were raped or sexually assaulted in 2006. That’s more than 600 women every day.

There can be no justice on earth until we address this greatest of travesties.

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Rape charges against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange

August 21, 2010 by Peter · Leave a Comment 

The Wikileaks saga has taken a bizarre turn with this:

A Swedish tabloid says an arrest warrant has been issued for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on suspicion of rape, and officials have issued a statement “confirming media reports.”  The prosecutor’s office in Stockholm “confirms media reports that a foreign citizen has been arrested in absentia” but doesn’t name Assange.

As I emphasized with the Al Gore case [he was subsequently cleared by authorities], we should never dismiss rape, sexual assault or molestation accusations out of hand. Far too often there’s a culture of shaming, blaming, marginalizing and ignoring victims. Still, Assange has pissed off some very powerful people and this will raise questions. Oliver Willis simply writes “hm.”

Look for others to do the same.

UPDATE: Yet another twist:

Sweden has canceled an arrest warrant for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange on accusations of rape and molestation.

UPDATE II: Here we go again:

The rape case involving WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is being reopened, Swedish prosecutors said Wednesday.

“There is reason to believe that a crime has been committed,” read a statement from Marianne Ny, Sweden’s director of public prosecutions. “Considering information available at present, my judgment is that the classification of the crime is rape.”

Filed under POLITICS, WOMEN · Tagged with , , , ,

Violence against women and the law

August 19, 2010 by Peter · 2 Comments 

Striking:

[O]nly about one third of countries around the world have laws in place to combat violence against women, and in most of these countries those laws are not enforced, well resourced or taken seriously.

Violence against women and girls, in the form of human trafficking, harmful cultural practices, rape as a tactic of war and domestic violence, is one of the single greatest barriers holding women back. A staggering statistic: one out of every three women will be a victim of violence in her lifetime. And the problem is getting worse every year.

I stick by this New Year’s prediction:

Another decade closes, another decade dawns, another thing you can bet on in the years to come: women across this planet will be disrespected, beaten, abused, violated, oppressed. Simply for being born female.

I have one child, a daughter. Not yet 2. But I know full well that her gender automatically brings with it the likelihood that at some point (perhaps at many points), she’ll be treated like a second-class citizen.

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