Bob Herbert / Punished for being Female

[shance]

The report, a compilation of many studies from around the world, should have been seen as the latest dispatch from that permanent world war — the war against women all over the planet. Instead, the news media greeted its shocking contents with a collective yawn.

The war analogy is not an overstatement. In many parts of the world, men beat, torture, rape and kill women with impunity. In Ciudad Juárez, a Mexican city on the Texas border, 300 to 400 women have been murdered over the past several years. Many were raped and mutilated. The widespread belief that punishment for these crimes was unlikely was a “key factor” in their occurrence, the report said.

Each year thousands of wives in India are murdered and maimed — many of them doused with kerosene and set ablaze — by husbands dissatisfied by the size of their dowries or angry about their wives’ behavior.

(snip)

While it’s undoubtedly true that men maim and kill other men in astonishing numbers, what I’m talking about here is the way that women, by the millions, are systematically targeted for attack because they are women.

(snip)

The litany of serious abuses against women and girls can seem endless: child marriages, forced marriages, kidnapping and forced prostitution, sex slavery. According to the U.N. report, “A study in India estimated that prenatal sex selection and infanticide have accounted for half a million missing girls per year for the past two decades.”

The most common form of serious abuse against women and girls around the globe is violence by intimate partners. Huge percentages of female murder victims, even in such developed countries as Australia, Canada, Israel and the United States, are killed by current or former husbands or boyfriends.

http://majorityreportradio.wordpress.com/2006/11/01/bob-herbert-punished-for-being-female

[donsu]

1. Bob Herbert speaking truth to power

thank you

[shance]

3. It's so nice when I see men confronting issues affecting women

Especially well known journalists who could play it safe and stay on the easier softer topics.

In short, theres just no better way to turn a woman on than to show her that you really care.

;)

[Doctor_J]

2. Thank God we have Don Sherwood

he only beats his mistress, not his wife.

Sorry for making this into a partisan issue.

This is nothing less than a holocaust. Maybe the next thing Bill & Melinda can turn their vast resources toward.

[shance]

4. It is heartbreaking. What I find most heartbreaking is that American women

have been so conditioned through our culture not to see our value and/or to see other women's value.

We are so powerful when we come together.

Perhaps that is why many men and unconscious women are always trying to keep women down, marginalized, demonized and submissive to men.

Our loving, nurturing power as women has been rendered lacking value in our male dominated culture, and yet it is the female energy which sustains and maintains growth and health in our lives.

[shance]

5. kick

n/t

[smirkymonkey]

6. Has anyone ever noticed that the countries with the lowest

standards of living are the countries that are the most violently misogynistic (Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa)? And in those countries with the highest standard of living, women have more power and equality (Scandinavian Countries, Holland, Canada, etc.)? I am not referring to economic power only, but other measures such as freedom of speech, press; most democratic and least corrupt, etc. Although misogyny is found everywhere, there is a continuum and it seems to hold true that the least democratic nations are those in which women are treated worse than livestock.

Which came first? Low standards of living cause men to hate and abuse women or hating and abusing women create societies with low standards of living. It doesn't explain everything, but there is a strong correlation.

[shance]

7. I agree. You bring up a good point.

I tend to think when "economies" or monetary systems become so corrupt, the people who are not holding monetary power are the first to be abused and cast as expendable. That is why I believe monetary systems are unjust and environmentally hazardous, especially if you look at the war profiteering and the environmental disasters that come from war. But I digress.

Women and children are the ones who continually are affected the most and receive the brunt of the abuse and violence. Because bullies and predators don't pick targets their own size, they go for people they know they can easily take with no fight.