16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence
November 26th, 2007 by Anindita Sengupta
The campaign for 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence kicked off yesterday. Coordinated by the Center for Women’s Global Leadership, the campaign runs from November 25 to December 10 every year and since 1991, has helped raise awareness about gender violence and has highlighted its effects on women globally. For more, go here.
So here’s what I thought you should know about. UNFPA has a list of the five most under-reported forms of violence against women. Brace yourself. It’s not pretty. The list includes bride-napping, breast-ironing, traumatic fistula, femicide and child marriage. Bride-napping and child marriage are reasonably common terms so here are definitions of the other three.
Breast-ironing, a traditional practice in a number of West African countries that involves crushing the breasts of young girls in order to deter male attention;
The epidemic of traumatic fistula in Africa, which is caused by gang rape and often the forced insertion of foreign objects into the rape victim. This results in the tearing of the delicate tissues separating the birth canal from the bowel and/or the bladder. Seriously injured and psychologically traumatized, the victim is left incontinent, leaking faeces, urine, or both. Too often, her family and community rejects her, to live out the remainder of her life as a pariah—doubly stigmatized—both by the rape itself and its terrible consequences.
The ongoing femicide of women in the Central American country of Guatemala. Unlike the killings of young women in Ciudad Juarez, on the El Paso/Mexico border, the wholesale murder and mutilation of Guatemala’s women continues to be enacted under a cloak of media silence and official neglect.
Sometimes, one may well wonder what the point of knowing such things is. Most of us think we live fairly powerless lives with little ability to move or change anything in the wider world out there, let alone in distant Guatemala, Mexico or Kenya. Well, the 16 Days Action Kit may change your view about how much (or little) you can do. In a nutshell, you can:
I would say that’s quite a few different options and at least a few of them are easy to do even if you’re busy, a man, a “non-feminist”, apolitical, and “not the activist type”. To go a step further, it seems to me that no. 1 is a no-brainer and should be possible to do all year round and not just for these 16 days. What do you think?
November 27th, 2007 at 5:05 am
It is indeed appalling to read about all the different kind of violence that women undergo. When are we going to understand the meaning of equality? How many more centuries do we require to educate ourselves?