Femicide. When one types this word in a Microsoft Office program, it appears as a spelling error. Yet in light of recent statistics, it becomes paradoxical to consider how state powers confront this escalating problem in such a trivialized manner.

Femicide, according to Dr. Diana Russell, is the killing of women and girls because of their gender.

Roughly 66,000 women are violently killed around the world each year. India and China are said to eliminate more female infants than the number of girls born in the US each year. The UN reports approximately 200 million girls in the world today as ‘missing’.

What’s most shocking is that a high proportion of femicides are committed in the home, particularly in countries such as Norway and Australia where street and organized crime are at a low. Furthermore, UNODC reports that 40 to 70 per cent of female murders have been linked to intimate partner/family-related violence. It’s alarming to consider that being at home with the family has now become one of the most insecure and dangerous places for women to live in.

A mention of femicide cannot fully be encompassed without making reference to some of the capitals where it has become an enduring problem. Jaurez, Mexico has been nicknamed the ‘the capital of murdered women’. In 2005, more than 800 bodies were found in vacant lofts, outlying areas or even in the desert; raped, abused, tortured or even mutilated. What about the forgotten bodies? The deaths we didn’t hear about?

Despite the Mexican Government’s 2007 adoption of the General Law of Access for Women to a Life Free of Violence (GLAWLFV), very little has been done to ensure its implementation and its guaranteeing of protection of the life and integrity of women in Mexico. “There is a systematic pattern of impunity in Mexico, a reflection of the lack of access to justice for women.”  Women who even consider accessing the justice system are not only ridiculed and discriminated against, but also place their own lives at risk. The lack of Federal and local action as well as formal investigations, judgments and sanctions by the justice system has stimulated an atmosphere in which murderers, tortures and rapists of women are protected, and where impunity is completely justifiable.

Dr. Rita Banerji is a gender activist in India and founder of The 50 Million Missing campaign, and her recent powerpoint presentation at the Femicide Symposium in Vienna, coordinated by the Academic Council of the United Nations, presented some jaw-dropping forms of femicide cases in India: from female infanticide, to the killing of girls 5 years and under through starvation and violence, to dowry deaths, honor killings and many others. Young baby girls are simply unwanted and are inhumanely killed; salted, strangled and poisoned. In the recent documentary ‘It’s a Girl’, which brings the crux of the problem vividly on screen, an Indian mother admits, as she is chuckling to herself, that she killed eight of her daughters after giving birth to them.

Contrary to the assumptions that femicide is a problem of poverty-stricken areas and enacted by people from areas of lack of access to education, research shows that it is in fact affluent and urban middle classes who are perpetuating the killings. In India, these are the people who have access to prenatal screenings and who can afford the abortions. In the last decade in India, 8 million fetuses have been aborted, causing an increasing demographic imbalance between the male-to-female ratio.

Femicide is often dismissed as a cultural phenomenon, as with the case of the dowry deaths in India. However, this is a gross misinterpretation; femicide is a cultural ‘practice’ that has become internalized and completely accepted in some societies. Paradoxically, as Dr.Banerji points out, when societies are confronted with their own shocking statistics of the brutal killing of baby girls and women, enacted and perpetuated by some of the most educated and upper-class civilians, the common response is denial and disbelief.

Furthermore, while states have numerous laws and policies in place, there is a lack of action to ensure that they are being carried out at political, social and cultural level. Tackling femicide requires the ongoing development, implementation and enforcement of strong legislation, raising public awareness through the media and at grassroots level, and publically voicing the horrific experiences and struggles of women. Because this is what is lacking: a Voice.

The state needs to wake up. Femicide should not be a spelling error. It is a reality, and it should be a voiced reality.

The article Femicide: How Long Before the Voices Are Heard? appeared first on The Toonari Post - News, Powered by the People!.

Zambia is a country found in the southern region of Africa and has a population of about 13 million people .The change of government in Zambia last year has changed many things, including the way the news is reported.

At the beginning of the year the media opened up many issues that were not publicly discussed previously and one of these includes the issue of gender violence and child sexual abuse, legally defined in Zambia as Child defilement. These issues are frightening to most parents because they are no longer comfortable to leave their children, especially their girl children, alone with any male relative or stranger, as is the custom with most Zambian families.

More and more cases of child defilement have been reported by the local media, with shocking reports of adult men raping children as young as one month old. Offences of defilement have continued to rank amongst the highest; numbers of those reported are very across the country.

This has prompted the Zambian government and ordinary citizens to demand stiffer punishment for culprits. Current punishments for perpetrators of child defilement includes jail sentences of a minimum of 9 years, but this has not deterred the rising cases of defilement, prompting calls for even more hefty prison sentences, hence the need to increase the sentence to 15 years.

However, for many parents their greatest fear is their children’s risk of contracting HIV should they fall victim of being raped. A common belief among some people suffering from HIV/AIDS is that if they have sex with a minor, then they will be cured of HIV. Most children who are sexually abused, later on test positive to HIV. This phenomenon is a destruction of the future generation, even though every adult has the responsibility to protect it. Nevertheless morals have fallen so much that children are not given a chance.

Stakeholders such as churches, and community workers have been lobbying the Ministry of Education to introduce child defilement education in the school syllabus so that children are aware of the danger of child rape and when children are victims they can seek help from social welfare for those who are not in school and to the teachers and counselors for those who are in schools. This education will help children to know when it is wrong.

The children who have been defiled are abused by close members of the child’s family such as uncles, cousins or grandfathers, and in some cases by their own biological fathers or step fathers. According to Save the Children, Cage the Rapists Posted by AllAfrica on January 11, 2012 we are told that civil society, the Church and all activists should lobby authorities so that appropriate remedies could be considered to deal with what can only be described as an epidemic of dangerous proportions.

Image Courtesy of   Espen Faugstad

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Amnesty International, the British non-governmental organization, and the international shop ‘Women Secret’ have released an advertising campaign by selling t-shirts and shorts around the 320 shops that they have in Spain, with the objective of supporting those women who suffer gender violence.

With the motto “You can´t keep gender violence as a secret,” the lingerie shop wants to donate around 40.000 Euros (around 55,500 dollars) to this NGO so that they could use it to support the gender violence cases.  Starting this month, this campaign will be available until the next summer.

This mini collection includes three shorts and three t-shirts with positive and solidarity  messages on it that encourage women to say “no” to gender violence. The garment, made by the designer Little is drawing, also includes a yellow logo from Amnesty International.

As the Women Secret´s chairman, Jaume Miquel, stated at the advertising campaign presentation in Madrid the chain is really worried about gender violence because they have around 1.150 employees, and at least 1.000 of them are women.

Miquel has also claimed that they did this campaign last year in Portugal with excellent results. What they did in the shop window was to announce for a short period of time ads with the motto “Coming up in 15 or three weeks” and the word ‘Secret’ covered by  a yellow tape, so people could just see the word ‘Women’ with a candlelight next to it.

On the other hand, the Amnesty International chairman´s, Ana Rebollar, pointed out that gender violence is “the most popular Human Right´s rape, because one of three women is hit, and is forced to have sex with her husband or boyfriend”.

Rebollar also wanted to highlight that according to the World Health Organization, the 70% of women who suffer from the abuse die due to gender violence episodes. This is the first death reason among women between 16 and 34 years old.

The non- governmental chairman also added that gender violence should be recognized by law as a “big crime”. Rebollar also stated that “in Spain the legislation doesn´t guarantee the victim’s protection and it doesn´t take care of the immigrant women that die on average five times more than the Spanish women”.

Today, ‘Women Secret’ has shops in 48 different countries all over the world and you can find it online at women’secret.com.

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