International Women's Day is sponsored by the United Nations and occurs annually on March 8th. It was first celebrated in 1975, the UN's International Women's Year. The theme of International Women's Day 2007 was “Take action to end impunity for violence against women and girls.” Violence against girls and women is commonly considered to be a world-wide epidemic. According to the UN's International Women's Day 2007 fact sheet, “Violence against women is the most common but least punished crime in the world.” This applies to the Middle East as much as to the rest of the world, although each region and culture has its own particular issues. Sexual violence and exploitation, or the threat of such violence and exploitation, is commonly used as a weapon against women during times of war and civil disruption. Historically, the extent of the problem in any given war is hidden until years or even decades after the war, so right now we are probably only hearing about a very small fraction of the problems from the battles in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Of course, as the events at Abu Garab prison show, this is not a threat reserved for women only.
The incidence of violence against women, in any culture, is hard to determine. Often, violence occurs within the family and remains a family secret. In 2005, UNIFEM sponsored a study on violence against women in Syria by looking at almost 2000 families from throughout Syria. The study did not attempt to report how many women had been victims of violence, but it did report that 67% of women had been punished in front of their family, and that in 87% of these cases, that punishment included beatings. 6% of husbands did not allow their wives to visit female friends and family members; this is particularly troubling because we know that in many cases keeping people from friends and family is part of the pattern of domestic abuse. The UNIFEM study seems to have distinguished between violence intended as discipline (which it called discipline) and violence for its own sake. 21.8% of women had experienced various types of violence not intended as discipline, including insult, beating, sexual harassment, robbery, assault, and kidnapping. Depending on the transgression, 50-80% of these acts were committed by family members! While family members defended the women in just over 70% of the cases of sexual harassment; in the majority of other transgressions, the women's families blamed her, not the transgressor. Most chilling, in 55% of cases where men killed their wives for committing adultery, the family felt the woman was responsible.
This isn't intended to pick on Syria over the rest of the Middle East or the world, only to look at one country where we have some reasonable data. Violence against girls and women is a problem throughout the world, only the specific issues vary at all from nation to nation and culture to culture. Let us all do what we can to help meet the goal of International Women's Day 2007 and “Take action to end impunity for violence against women and girls.”
2007 International Women's Day Fact Sheet on Violence Against Women
UNIFEM - Violence against Women Study in Syria
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