Say No to Violence Against Women World Wide

Suzanne Reisman — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 10:35:52 -0600

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month in the US, and in my post about it, I cited some alarming statistics. While it is horrifying that an average of one in six American women will be abused in her lifetime, it is even more outrageous that this rate doubles for women around the globe: 33% of women and girls are beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused, according to the United Nations Development Programme for Women (UNIFEM). As concerned citizens, we can sit here, read this statistic, and wring our hands over it, or we can do something about it. In these economically challenging times, a free way to make a big impact on violence against women is to join UNIFEM's Say No to Domestic Violence Campaign. (Warning: this short video with Nicole Kidman is extremely moving. Keep a tissue handy.) UNIFEM also has a podcast on the issue.

Some scary facts from UNIFEM:

Violence against women and girls is a problem of pandemic proportions... Perhaps the most pervasive human rights violation that we know today, it devastates lives, fractures communities, and stalls development.

In no country in the world are women safe from this type of violence. Out of ten counties surveyed in a 2005 study by the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 50 percent of women in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Peru and Tanzania reported having been subjected to physical or sexual violence by intimate partners, with figures reaching staggering 71 percent in rural Ethiopia. Only in one country (Japan) did less than 20 percent of women report incidents of domestic violence. An earlier WHO study puts the number of women physically abused by their partners or ex-partners at 30 percent in the United Kingdom, and 22 percent in the United States.

For more information on partner violence, sexual violence, traditional practices that harm women, trafficking, HIV/AIDS, and how armed conflict impacts women, visit the UNIFEM site.

UNIFEM is collecting one million signatures on a petition to present to Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on November 25, 2008, which is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. Many bloggers have already signed on to the petition and are helping to spread the word. (See sample list below.) Everything you need to sign the petition and help promote it on your blog are on the Say No to Violence website. To reach their goal, UNIFEM needs approximately 400,000 more signatures in the next ten days. I know that the blogsphere can make this happen if we band together to let people know about this critical issue.

A few bloggers who already signed on to the campaign and are getting the word out around the world:

If this issue is also important to you, please add your name to the petition, blog about it so that others will find out about the campaign, and leave a link to your post in the comments to this post. We are all in this together. As Nicole Kidman said, "When you think about it, being a woman puts you at risk... Every woman deserves justice."

Suzanne also blogs about life at Campaign for Unshaved Snatch (CUSS) & Other Rants. Her first book, Off the Beaten (Subway) Track, is about unusual things to see and do in New York City.

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Say No to Violence Against Women World Wide