Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (4 page)

In India, the practice of sex-selective abortions in favor of male babies has become so widespread that the male-female balance has been dramatically thrown off (despite the fact that gender-based abortions have been illegal since 1994). One Indian fetal medicine specialist estimates that a million female fetuses are aborted every year in India. Even very conservative estimates put the number at half a million.
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The danger is greatest in urban areas with more access to amniocentesis and ultrasound, but laptop ultrasound units are now appearing in areas so remote that they don’t yet have electricity or running water.
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Although officially illegal in India, informing expectant parents of the sex of their unborn child is a common practice that is rarely punished.
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The United Nations estimates that 5,000 honor killings (murder at the hand of family members of women suspected of adultery) occur each year, most of them in Muslim countries. Incest perpetrators have used such “honor killings” to cover up their crimes when their victims become pregnant, and others have used them to solve disputes over inheritance. Some victims of rape or sexual abuse have even been forced to commit suicide.
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In China, 39,000 girls under the age of one die every year specifically because their parents don’t provide them with the same medical care and attention that they give to boys. For the same reason, girls in India between the ages of one and five are 50 percent more likely to die than boys of the same age.
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In Ghana, the first sexual experience for 21 percent of young women is rape.
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One woman worldwide dies in childbirth every minute. In the African nation of Niger, women have a 1 in 7 chance of dying in childbirth over their entire lifetime. In India, the lifetime risk is 1 in 70. (In the United States it’s 1 in 4,800, and in Ireland it’s 1 in 47,600.)
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A 2003 report by a division of the Cyprus government recently reported that more than 2,000 women a year, particularly those arriving from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics hoping for a better life, end up forced into prostitution and trafficked to other European and Arab countries.
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A United Nations report estimates that in Asia alone, about a million children work in the sex trade and are kept in slavery-like conditions (such as being locked in brothels and beaten if they are uncooperative, not to mention being undernourished and sedated with drugs to both pacify them and get them addicted).
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Due to widespread exploitation, sexual abuse, and discriminatory practices, teenage girls in southern Africa and the Caribbean are infected with AIDS four to seven times more often than are boys.
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In Swaziland (which has the highest rate of HIV infection in the world, with one in three people infected) almost one in four girls is HIV positive.
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In Asia, 17 percent of all adults infected with HIV were women in 1990; by 2008, that figure had jumped to 35 percent. A report presented at the 2009 International Congress on AIDS in Asia and the Pacific adds an interesting twist, estimating that more than 90 percent of the 1.7 million women living in Asia who are infected with HIV caught the virus from their husbands or from partners with whom they were in long-term relationships. The report added that 50 million Asian women are currently at risk for contracting HIV infection from their intimate partners.
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In a 2005 presentation in New York City, UNESCO decreed that violence against women and girls (including rape and torture as “a new strategy of warfare”) has become not only a major human rights problem affecting one in three females worldwide but also “a major public health emergency” of global proportions.
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A particularly horrifying example comes from the UN Population Fund, which reports that of the almost 16,000 new cases of sexual violence registered in 2008 in the Democratic Republic of Congo, 65 percent involved adolescent girls and other children. Such violence includes sexual enslavement, forced incest, gang rape in front of families and community members, and stabbing and shooting women’s genitals.
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Riane Eisler, author of the best-selling book
The Chalice and the Blade
(Harper & Row, 1987) as well as
The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a
Caring Economics
(Berrett-Koehler, 2007), writes, “The world at large is finally waking up to the fact that we can no longer ignore the victims of intimate violence and the link between intimate violence and international violence, including terrorism.” After much research, Eisler cofounded the nonprofit Center for Partnership Studies (with her husband, social psychologist and futurist David Loye) to introduce a new partnership-based model of human rights, and “to show the link between ‘women’s and children’s issues’ and social violence, poverty, and other global problems, [as well as] to put an end to gender inequality and intimate violence.” (For more information on how she is helping to effect global change, see the Spiritual Alliance to Stop Intimate Violence program on the website of the Center for Partnership Studies at
www.partnershipway.org
.)

Because of Eisler and others like her, the tide is starting to turn. In 2009 alone, President Obama appointed a new White House Council on Women and Girls, the State Department created the new Office of Global Women’s Issues, and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee formed a new subcommittee that deals with women’s issues. A particularly inspiring message comes from Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists and husband-and-wife team Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, coauthors of
Half the Sky: Turning
Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
(Knopf, 2009). In a special issue of the
New York Times Magazine
devoted to women and girls in the developing world, Kristof and WuDunn wrote: “There’s a growing recognition among everyone from the World Bank to the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff to aid organizations like CARE that focusing on women and girls is the most effective way to fight global poverty and extremism. That’s why foreign aid is increasingly directed to women. The world is awakening to a powerful truth: Women and girls aren’t the problem; they’re the solution.”
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PATRIARCHY RESULTS IN ADDICTION

The patriarchal organization of our society demands that women, its second-class citizens, ignore or turn away from their hopes and dreams in deference to men and the demands of their families. Instead of learning how to pay attention to the genius of our intuition and inner guidance, we instead internalize the belief that we are not worthy enough, smart enough, or good-looking enough to live lives of freedom, joy, and fulfillment. Lacking a compassionate language that acknowledges universal human needs, many women (and men) turn to addictions such as overwork, overcare, smoking, drugs and alcohol, and overeating to numb their pain. This results in an endless cycle of abuse that we ourselves help perpetuate. What I’m calling abuse might be as subtle as feeling guilty about getting enough sleep! Being abused or abusing ourselves, we become ill. Then we turn to a medical system that is set up to deliver mostly quick-fix pharmaceutical solutions to problems that can’t be healed until we change our core beliefs and thoughts.