"Violence against women and girls continues unabated in every continent, country and culture. It takes a devastating toll on women’s lives, on their families, and on society as a whole. Most societies prohibit such violence — yet the reality is that too often, it is covered up or tacitly condoned." — UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, 8 March 2007
Hello, it has been a little while since I updated my blog, such has been the sheer amount of activities that I have been involved with both as part of my assignment at work and a very busy social life in Hanoi.
So to address the gap I thought I would I would try and write a series of articles about some of the issues that the Centre for Creative Initiatives in Health and Population (CCIHP), the organisation that I work for, tackle here in Vietnam. The first of which is about violence against women.
It is a sobering thought that around the world as many as 1 in 3 women will at some point in their lives suffer some form of violence or abuse, often by a husband or intimidate partner. Among women aged between 15- 44 years, the risk of disablement or death from violence is higher than that from cancer, motor vehicle accidents and malaria. Such is the extent of the problem that it has been described “as the most pervasive yet least recognized human rights abuse in the world."
Such human rights abuses are varied and can occur at any point in woman’s life, they include pre-natal sex selection, female genital mutilation, bride burning or dowry related crimes, physical or emotional violence by an intimate partner, trafficking of women and children, exploitation of domestic workers, honour based murders and the brutal use of sexual violence as a weapon of war.
Lets just for a moment look at just of the hidden, often unreported statistics about this issue.
In the Russian Federation half of all murder victims are women killed by their male partners, to put this figure into perspective each and every year more women are killed as a result of domestic violence in Russia, than the entire number of Russian fatalities resulting from the 10 year Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
Recent studies estimate that each year two million girls between the ages of 5 and 15 enter the sex industry.
In Asia, approximately 60 million women are ‘missing’ killed through infanticide and selective abortion or deliberate under-nutrition.
It is estimated that 500,000 women are trafficked into Western Europe each year often for the purposes of sexual exploitation. Globally trafficking is the third fastest growing crime.
Based on recent studies, more than 130 million women and girls in Africa, Middle East and Asia, have undergone female genital mutilation and an estimated 2 million girls are at risk for undergoing the procedure each year.
In France, 95% of the victims of violence are women, 51% of them at the hands of intimate partners, in the UK 1 to 2 women are murdered by their male partners each week.
The costs of intimate partner violence in the United States alone exceeds US$5.8 billion per year.
But these statistics do not tell the individual stories of women who have been abused. Take the story of just one victim, in just one country, a married women from a small coastal town in Vietnam…
“Some day, when I was supposed to eat my meal, he asked me to go to the pigsty to eat there; he did not permit me to eat inside our house. Another day, I brought a pig-leg to make soup. When I went out for a second, he poured the liquid from the dead fish’s viscera that was used for making pig’s meal into my soup. He was very cruel […] he often hit me.
One time, he poured boiled water over my body. It was lucky that I wore the conical straw hat so that only half my body was burned. I had to go to the hospital and stay in my parents’ house for one and a half months and lie on banana leaves and be covered with the fine cloth used for making mosquito nets”.
The Government of Vietnam determined to ensure that such abuses do not continue brought together various laws and regulations into one single framework in 2007. The Law on Gender-based Violence makes it clear that such abuses are unacceptable and will be severely punished, but in a society where such violence is too often seen as private matter, either to be resolved within the family or endured by the woman as a ‘normal’ part of marriage, its implementation can be problematic.
Fortunately the work of CCIHP is helping to ensure that women are able to access services and exercise their rights under the law. Through careful research and interventions, CCIHP has worked with victims as well supporting services to ensure that women are aware of their rights, that counseling services are responsive to their needs and that the police and justice systems recognize that violence against women needs to be treated seriously and addressed promptly.
Working together with other NGOs, government institutions and mass organizations, CCIHP has tried to ensure that other women do not have to endure the violence described above. But with only 2 shelters nationwide for victims of violence, and where deeply entrenched social norms and attitudes can tacitly condone such abuses it is clear that still more needs to be done not only to ensure the safety of victims but also to prevent such violence from occurring in the first place.
This can only be achieved by tackling the gender inequalities that result in women being viewed as fundamentally of lesser value than men. Tackling such attitudes involves working with men and boys, as well as women and girls, for it is only by changing such attitudes that violence against women will come to be seen as a brutal violation of a woman’s right to live a life free from violence and abuse rather than an accepted and invisible norm
Attached is a short video campaign against domestic violence in Vietnam that draws upon the specific cultural context.
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