The War Against Women

Thanks to Bob Herbert for calling attention to a problem shamelessly ignored by the majority of men (and women!) everywhere: the abuse of women.

Punished for Being Female
By Bob Herbert
The New York Times

"...Bride burnings, honor killings, female infanticide, sex trafficking, mass rape as a weapon of war and many other hideous forms of violence against women are documented in a report released last month by the United Nations.

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.

[...]

A study of young, female murder victims in the U.S. found that homicide was the second leading cause of death for girls 15 to 18, and that 78 percent of all the homicide victims in the study had been killed by an acquaintance or intimate partner.

The U.N. report tells us what we should already have concluded: that this pervasive violence against women, “whether perpetrated by the state and its agents, or by family members or strangers, in the public or private sphere, in peacetime or in times of conflict,” is unacceptable....."

Photo credit: Bob Herbert. (The New York Times)

TimesSelect Subscribers read more here.

Non-Subscribers, donkey o.d. has provided a reprint here. (Thanks D.O.D.)

Technorati tags: Bob Herbert, New York Times, Women, Abuse, Freedom, Human Rights, Jessica Neuwirth, Equality Now, news, commentary, op ed