Dear All, I am by no means an expert in women and violence. Nevertheless, a lot of my studies have been about violence and women. I am a foreigner who lives in India, and the attitude towards women in this country is particularly sick. Because I am a foreigner, men here perceive me as a "loose woman", although the majority of the time I am in Indian clothing, or failing that clothes which in a western society would not be deemed as provocative. Nevertheless, the men who are sometimes educated, and know of the issues about violence against women, still they treat women, whether Indian or foreign, with disdain. The treatment of women and their attitude thereof is demeaning and particularly worrying. So the question is does counselling for men work, isn't that rather too late? Naturally, counselling for men should be included, especially if they have been abusive, then their problems and attitudes should be addressed. But here in Indian Society, it is instilled in the boy child to be naturally violent towards the girl child, and they thus grow up thinking that it is normal to hit girls and in some cases sexually abuse them. Men here stare at women, and they rape you with their eyes, should we not be concentrating also on the children, instilling in them a different way of looking upon women. If they are old enough to think that it is alright to hit the girl child, then they are also old enough to learn that it is not.
I have spent much of my time with slum children educating them about their rights, they do learn, which is sometimes heartbreaking to see, as the majority of these children are not achieving their most fundamental rights, nevertheless they do know the difference between right and wrong, it is just a matter of education and instilling in them that their natural beliefs are the right ones. Teaching children about the rights and wrongs is a start. The second thing which should also be discussed is the fact that both men and women alike tend to stigmatise women who have been raped, and in many closed societies it is better for the abused woman to suffer in silence, rather than telling her family or even husband that she has been abused (in the case when it is not the husband abusing). This is one of the main reasons why rape as a weapon of war is so rampant, and indeed so succesful in recent times, because it does hurt, maim and effect the whole of society. When are men going to realise, and some women too, that we are the sole possessors of our bodies, and if a woman has the absolute misfortune to be raped, she should most definitely not be frowned upon in her own society and by her husband? In many cases in Bosnia where the women were raped, many husbands could not handle this, and as a direct consequence of the rape they left their wives. Something must be done about our attitude of sex and the way women are perceived, and this I believe has to start from when we are children in all societies. It should be a bottom-up approach, and all aspects of the law should also be questioned. But first is the attitude of all society, and only then can we win this war which seems never ending, and women can finally be allowed to live their lives with dignity (which in essence has been taken away from us from the way we are perceived, it is not that we, as women, or abused women have lost it). Miss Charlemagne Gomez Commonwealth Advocacy Programme Officer Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative F1/12a Haus Khas Enclave Ground Floor New Delhi - 110016 - India Tel: 00 91 11 686 4678 Fax: 00 91 11 686 4688 [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.humanrightsinitiative.org On Mon, 21 Jan 2002, Margaret Sargent wrote: > >I support what both Elaine Walters and Cheryl Soehl have written in >response to this post. > >We live in a society where violence against women is a substantial problem. >It can be viewed as a systemic problem in that it seems to be grounded in >the construction of masculinity. The persistence of the problem in spite of >the many programs focused on changing male behaviour tends to confirm this. > >We must ask what is the nature of the social change required for a >reduction in violence against women to occur? It cannot be solely a >psychological reconfiguration of gender relations between individuals - >although it must include this. It needs firstly to bring change in overall >'normal', everyday individual male-female relations and, secondly, group >relations among the majority of members of our society. Gender relations of >power have to provide, for: > > ***End-violence is sponsored by UNIFEM and receives generous support from ICAP*** To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe end-violence OR type: unsubscribe end-violence Archives of previous End-violence messages can be found at: http://www.edc.org/GLG/end-violence/hypermail/
