Wow, you’ve got to hand it to the Catholic Church, they are truly on a roll. Not only does marrying a Muslim man cause a “pile of trouble” and using birth control cause male infertility, but now it seems that women provoke rape and sexual assault by the way they dress and behave:
With plunging necklines and mini-skirts, “they’re provoking men,” said the archbishop of Santo Domingo, Nicolas de Jesus Lopez Rodrigez during the Sixth World Meeting of the Families.
Women expose themselves to rape, to being used, to being treated like an old dishrag, because they devalue themselves and their dignity, said the auxiliary bishop of Tegucigalpa, Darwin Rudy Andino.
Likewise, laypersons who attended the meeting said that women are the ones responsible for physical as well as verbal attacks. They should dress modestly and not arouse kinkiness in other people.
Renato Ascencio, the bishop of Ciudad Juarez, women should not only change the way they dress, but also their behavior. Modesty has been lost in the Mexican family, he said.
With that level of institutionalized misogyny, it is hardly surprising that the never-ending epidemic of femicide in Juarez continues:
On the same day Barack Obama was inaugurated as the first African-American president in U.S. history, an old story was repeating itself in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, across the river from El Paso, Texas. Staging a caravan through the violence-ridden city, a new group of mothers of disappeared young women brought public attention to the cases of daughters who went missing after January 2008. Holding a rally at the downtown Cathedral, the mothers demanded their daughters be returned home alive.
Demonstrators also demanded action in the cases of Hilda Gabriela Rivas, Brenda Ponce, Lidia Ramos, and Brenda Berenice Castillo. Representatives
of Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa, the Mexico Solidarity Network, Centro de Mujeres Tonantzin, and other non-governmental organizations joined in
the protest.At least 29 new cases of women who have disappeared in Ciudad Juarez since January 2008 are pending.
(M)urders of women officially reached all-time heights in Ciudad Juarez last year, when at least 86 women were slain; many homicides were connected to the narco war that claimed more than 1,600 lives overall.
In response to earlier publicity about the Ciudad Juarez femicides, some Chihuahua state and federal officials frequently pointed to the central state of Mexico as the most violent place for women in the country.
According to official sources cited in the Mexican press, 173 women were murdered and another 1,000 were raped in Mexico state in 2008. Less than
half the murder cases were reported solved.
Gee no, sorry, just because it is even worse elsewhere does not make this less of a problem. What is also so clear here is the complicity of the Catholic Church in its effectual sanction of the culture of impunity that allows the violence against women to continue in Mexico. The Catholic Church’s tacit approval of the patriarchal terrorizing of women is directly responsible for the deaths of too many women and the denial of human rights to too many more and it is time for the Church to be held responsible for its actions.
