One Billion Rising

Every February through March 8th, thousands of Risings take place in hundreds of countries across the world and within local communities. The 'billion' refers to the UN statistic that one in three women will be raped or beaten in her lifetime, or about one billion. In 2016 the theme of the campaign is Rise for Revolution.





On Saturday 5th of March, women demonstrated in central London.





Despite suffrage for women being won almost a century ago, gender inequality remains stubbornly entrenched. At its very sharpest end is violence against women, which kills two women a week in the UK. Austerity has brought on an abrupt reversal in the progress of gender equality as women's services begin to run out of funding and get shut down. Average numbers suggest that 150 women are turned away from domestic violence refuges each day. Furthermore, domestic violence and violence against women have increased since 2009, researchers have found, pushing up overall levels of violent crime.






Official statisticians in the UK cap the number in a series of crimes that a single person can report to the survey at five. This method excludes the experiences of 'high frequency' victims - particularly victims of domestic violence - who often make up more than 5% of respondents. Survivors of domestic abuse most often report not just one incident of violence and intimidation, or even several, but a systematic and sustained campaign of repression that can last years.

'How can you possibly put a cap on something and say that after five times it does not count?', said one victim of domestic violence who spent 27 years with her abusive husband. 'I remember all the incidents, I remember all the things that were done to me, and to say we are only going to count five times makes me feel worthless. It's like somehow this is your fault, it's like if this had happened more than five times then you must have been asking for it'.






The outrageous devaluing of women's lives has been allowed to persist because our society lacks the courage to name the problem - that the ideas we teach men and women to have about one another creates a culture in which gendered violence can thrive. There are so many men who believe they have the right to own and control the women in their lives, and that they are justified in using physical violence and emotional abuse in order to do it. The World Health Organisation argues that sexual violence against women is to an extent rooted in 'ideologies of male sexual entitlement'. In other words, men are not naturally more violent than women, but are taught to have certain expectations of relationships that can lead some men to assault, and in many cases, kill, their partners.





According to Catherine McKinnon, we need to adopt a gender-inclusive approach to the meaning of torture itself.  In certain circumstances, domestic violence should be considered a form of torture: when women are tortured because they are women through domestic violence, battering, rape, sexual abuse, by being prostituted and made into pornography - coercive circumstances and the politics of female subordination which may render consent meaningless and simply an alibi for abuse.






The destruction of women as women, because they are women, what we call femicide,  is largely ignored in international law. If things are going to change, crimes against women need to be recognised as such, so that women can begin to get the protection from the law that is necessary.


Sources:

The Guardian

One Billion Rising website

The writings of Catherine McKinnon

One Billion Rising

One Billion Rising, the campaign aimed at ending the violence that impacts on more than one billion women in the world spread across the globe yesterday, in a dance of solidarity with abuse survivors and as a means of raising awareness.





India

Violence is something that can happen to any one of us, at any time - it is the one factor that unites all women across the world. The facts are staggering: most of that violence comes at the hands of intimate partners; in the USA a woman is beaten by her partner every 15 seconds; in Egypt, 35% of women report being physically abused at least once in their lifetime; 35% of Turkish women have experienced marital rape; in South Africa 165 women report being raped every day; one in three women in the American military is raped; one in three women on the planet will be raped in her lifetime.





Toronto

So, why dance in the streets? It was a symbolic gesture to reclaim the streets, to say we will not hide, we will not stay at home out of sight so that we can be safe. We will not give in to the fear, the fear to participate in public life, the fear to live our lives the way men do, without anticipating physical attack, and worse still, being attacked and then being blamed for it.

 

Bhutan

To stop feeling that we have at all times to act available in a passive, submissive manner. To stop feeling that we have to be taking responsibility for 'protecting' ourselves from sexual assault because sexual assault is a fact of life. To start saying that it is not our responsibility to be cautious, to restrict ourselves, the wear the 'right' clothes, to be quieter, better behaved so that men don't rape us.



 

 

Bangladesh

To put the blame where it belongs, with the abusers, whether they are stranggers or members of our family. To establish once for all that women get raped because someone raped them, not because they were not 'careful' enough.

Sydney

To stop the assumption that sex is something done to women rather than something we do.

Manila, students from St Scholastica's College

To shatter the notion that rape is about sexual desire. Rape is about hatred. Jyoti Singh who died after a gang rape on a bus in Delhi that left her intestines pulverised was not the object of lust - the shoving of a rusty metal bar inside her was an act of hatred.

Prague

What of the 10 year old girl who was raped and filmed by 20 men in Texas?






Argentina

What of the hundreds of women in the Congo who end up in hospital with their vaginas, their uteri mutilated beyond repair?

 



Bern

What of the young women murdered by their parents because they refused to marry the man chosen for them?

 

 Genova

All these are instances of hatred, of trying to keep women 'in their place', of keeping them invisible, out of the way, cowed, submissive, frightened.

 

 

 



Adelaide

Hundreds of thousands of women danced in the streets yesterday as a way of saying enough.
This cannot go on.






Atlanta

We need to start building a better world where people are treated with respect and consideration. The hatred has got to stop.

Khartoum



Sources:
The Guardian
The New Statesman




For more information on current affairs go to: http://99getsmart.com/

2012 - another year of violence against women

Taking stock of the year that has just gone, 2012 was not a good year for the people in various parts of the world. One of the things that will remain with me is the savagery that some women across the world have had to suffer with misogyny reaching unprecedented heights.

A known rapist who was released by the Greek justice system because of insufficient evidence, stalked a young woman who was returning home, hit her while she was fitting the key in the lock of her block of flats, dragged her to the back of the garden, raped her viciously, beat her some more, stabbed her and then in an attempt to hide his tracks set fire to her. This is not an unusual occurrence as women suffer from unprovoked attacks every day all over the world, but only a few catch the popular imagination and this was one of them.

Then we have the events in India, namely the case of the 23 year old woman who boarded a bus in Delhi last month. Six men locked the door and savagely raped her for hours, including with a metal rod.  They dumped her naked in the street and after fighting for her life she died last weekend. In India a woman is raped every 22 minutes and few see justice. New Delhi has the highest incidence of sexual crimes against women in the whole of India - an instance of rape is reported every 18 hours and this is in a culture where there is serious discouragement for victims of rape to go to the authorities as women fear reprisals, humiliating treatment by the authorities and reputations indelibly stained.  In a lot of instances the authorities threaten women who disclose sexual abuse as was the case of another young woman who was gang raped, and who in the end committed suicide  after being warned by the police not to prosecute.

Protesters have massed in Indian cities on a daily basis since the attack demanding that the government and the police take sex crimes against women more seriously and hopefully this activism will continue so that change can be brought about.

India Gate in New Delhi

March to the Presidential Palace in New Delhi

 

School children have held candle lit vigils

 

 



as have women

 

More than 600 guitarists in Darjeeling performed a singalong of John Lennon's Imagine in tribute to the gang rape victim whose death has stirred India

I think this photograph is extraordinary - for women in a country like India to take their clothes off in public shows incredible courage, determination but also desperation.

And what about these modern day amazons?

The Gulabi Gang was formed as a response to domestic and sexual violence and caste-based discrimination. Some of their achievements so far: they've stopped child marriages; they've beaten up men who perpetrate domestic violence;  they forced the police to register crimes against Untouchables; they hijacked trucks full of food that were to be sold by corrupt officials. They are extremely effective and popular partly due to the fact that they openly defy abuses of male power.

'Why do people feel helpless?' wonders Sampat Pal Devi, founder of the group. 'If their rights are denied to them, all they've got to do is raise their voices'.

Meanwhile in the Congo, a study  due to be published in the American Journal of Public Health in June,  has found that 48 women are raped every hour - 1,152 women every day. The study found that sexual abuse was rampant not only in conflict areas where rape is used as a weapon of war, but also in the home with nearly one woman being subjected to some form of abuse every minute of the day. 'There are two surprises in the study', it was reported. 'First the magnitude of the problem - rates of rape are much higher than seen elsewhere. And second, that these alarming, shockingly high rape statistics are found in western Congo as well as well as northern and eastern Congo'.What needs to be noted here however, is that the number of reported violations are just the tip of the iceberg. A lot of women do not want to report being raped - the stigma is so high that many fear abandonment by their husbands and families if they disclose sexual abuse.

Women have not had it easy in Egypt either. There have been numerous reports of women being sexually assaulted by the crowd while protesting in Tahir Square. A crowd of 200 men assaulted one woman in Tahir Square in June who eventually fainted before others came to her rescue. A crowd of 300 assaulted three women in Tahir Square in November this year.

When women took to the streets to protest against such harrassment by their so-called comrades, they were assaulted by a mob of hundreds of men despite the fact that a group of male supporters had formed a ring around the demonstrating women to protect them. The mob broke through and started to grope the women. 'Women activists are at the core of the revolution', said Ahmed Hawary, 'if you break them, you break the spirit of the revolution'.

On 25 December women assembled in Tahir Square and cut their hair in protest against Egypt's new fundamentalist constitution.

The protest was also because fundamentalists stopped some women from going to the polling stations to vote.

Medicins Sans Frontiers have estimated that a woman is raped every 26 seconds in South Africa. In an anonymous survey by the Medical Research Council, one in four men admitted to raping a woman nearly half of whom admitted to having raped repeatedly. Another MRC study found that a woman is killed by her intimate partner every six hours.


The case of the underage young woman who was raped in a party in Ohio while on-lookers took photographs, joked about what was being done to her and posted the photographs and comments on social media websites, is the first widely publicised woman-hating incident of 2013 in the West.

The extensive, brutal global war against women must stop. These attacks have nothing to do with lust or sexual arousal - they are instances of hatred and of an attempt to teach women that they need to stay in 'their place'. The majority of cases of sexual assault go unreported because of the deep-seated culture of misogyny across the world that blames the victim and excuses the perpetrator. It's a war against women and we are the only ones who can mobilize to stop it as we owe this to ourselves as well as to other women.





Sources:

• 'Forty eight women being raped every hour in the Congo, study finds', Jo Adetunji, The Guardian
• 'Egyptian Women Sexually Assaulted in Tahir Square, The Guardian, 9 June 2012
• 'Crowd of 300 Sexually Assaults Women in Tahir Square, Egypt Independent, 25/22/2012
• 'Egypt: Women Cut their Hair... ', Informed Comment, 26/12/2012
• 'How Men in South Africa are trying to stop Violence Against Women', Atlantic, Dec. 28, 2012

For further information on current affairs to go: http://99getsmart.com/