As Say No-Unite points out, the first step to ending violence against women is ending the silence and speaking out. In that spirit at their kind invitation we share this compelling look at the trafficking of women and girls in Nepal, the first in a series of videos about violence against women throughout the world.

Cross-posted from Reclaiming Medusa:

Those of you of a certain age will remember those grade school Armageddon drills where we we were instructed to get under our desks and put our heads between our knees in case of a nuclear attack, a tactic that served no purpose and certainly wouldn’t have saved us if the Commies attacked.

Now the U.S. military has a new version of this callously useless advice that they are using in Marjah, Afghanistan:

Afghan villagers should stay inside and “keep their heads down” when thousands of U.S. Marines launch a massive assault on a densely-populated district in coming days, NATO’s civilian representative to Afghanistan said Tuesday.

The results are predictable, here is Robert Naiman’s well-worded summary of the results:

“Civilian casualties are inevitable,” said U.S. officials before launching their weekend military assault on Marja in southern Afghanistan, and in this case, they were telling the truth. Yesterday, the New York Times reports, a U.S. rocket strike “hit a compound crowded with Afghan civilians… killing at least 10 people, including 5 children.”

What justification has been provided by the government of the United States for its decision to kill these five children?

It will be argued that the government of the United States did not decide to kill these five children specifically, and that’s absolutely true. The U.S. government did not decide to kill these particular children; it only decided to kill some Afghan civilians, chosen randomly from Marja’s civilian population, when it decided to launch its military assault. These five children simply had the misfortune of holding losing tickets in a lottery in which they did not choose to participate…

…NATO forces have decided to advise civilians in Marjah not to leave their homes, although they say they do not know whether the assault will lead to heavy fighting.

These five kids were staying inside, as instructed. It didn’t save them from U.S. rockets. Perhaps they weren’t keeping their heads down.

You can read the rest of Naiman’s commentary here. Suffice it to say, “Duck” is not an acceptable strategy for protecting civilians and should be seen as a gross violation of international law.

Billions of dollars spent killing children. How dare we talk about winning or honor.

Via the Women’s Refugee Commission:

GENDER ASPECTS OF STATELESSNESS
excerpted from a talk by Ada Williams Prince on International Migrants Day

Statelessness, or the lack of effective nationality, impacts the daily lives of some 11-12 million people around the world. Although the exact numbers are not known, it is estimated that half of these people are women. All displaced women and girls face extreme levels of risk to their safety and well being. This is exacerbated when Women and Girls become stateless.How do women become stateless? This can be as a result of political change or when states deliberately write laws excluding minority groups from citizenship, such as in the Dominican Republic, Myanmar/Burma, Estonia and Latvia.

Gender discrimination is another crucial factor in statelessness. Gender discrimination in nationality means that a woman can lose her right to citizenship by virtue of marriage because she has to denounce her nationality when she gets married. And Women often cannot pass on their citizenship to their children.

Other ways of becoming stateless: People may lose access to their birth records and citizenship documents when the state systems linked to registration and citizenship are destroyed during conflict or disasters. Also, families forced to flee their homes and leave their possessions during conflict and natural disasters may leave without identification, or lose proof of citizenship documents, or have them stolen.

As a result of being stateless, refugee women and girls are also frequently unable to obtain passports, to travel freely, or acquire jobs in the formal sector. This puts them at risk of using smugglers to remove themselves from difficult situations or in hopes of supporting themselves and their families.

But, there are some solutions to these problems. For example, it is important that refugees receive individual ID cards, that women’s names appear on ration cards, and that births, marriages and deaths are registered. This kind of documentation and registration has an impact on refugee return, nationality and inheritance. For example, having an individual identity card can help facilitate movement, stop
the use of detention and offer protection against refoulement.

Statelessness has innumerable consequences on children, particularly girls. Those who suffer most are stateless infants, children and youth. Though born and raised in their parents’ country of residence, they lack formal recognition of their existence.

First, refugee mothers give birth outside their home countries and in most cases cannot pass on their nationality to their children. Countries that determine citizenship exclusively by the father’s nationality create problems for children born out of wedlock, separated from their fathers, or whose fathers are stateless.

Read the rest of this entry »

While many of us are still reeling from the Saturday late night Congressional massacre of women’s reproductive rights, I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know that women’s childbearing is responsible for global warming.  Who knew.  In an excellent piece on the harms of ’solving’ global warming with population control, Betsy Hartmann writes in On The Issues,

Overconsumption by the rich has far more to do with global  warming than population growth of the poor. The few countries in the world where population growth rates remain high, such as those in sub-Saharan Africa, have among the lowest carbon emissions per capita on the planet.

Serious environmental scholars have taken the population and climate change connection to task, but unfortunately a misogynist pseudo-science has been developed to bolster overpopulation claims. Widely cited in the press, a study by two researchers at Oregon State University blames women’s childbearing for creating a long-term “carbon legacy.”

The entire piece is highly recommended.

“Life and death is a political decision because we know what works and needs to be done.” according to UN Population Fund (UNFPA) Executive Director Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, a point surely not lost on Americans who have witnessed health care becoming a political football in this country. Speaking about the estimated 500,000 maternal mortality deaths that occur globally every year, she emphasized that the cost of preventing those deaths is, relatively speaking, minuscule compared to the amount that is spent on military spending:

“It would cost the world $23 billion per year to stop women from having unintended pregnancies and dying in childbirth, and to save millions of newborns. This amounts to less than 10 days of global military spending. Instead, the world loses $15 billion in productivity each year by allowing mothers and newborns to die.”

Got your calculators out? If you subtract lost productivity from the cost of ending these deaths, the net cost to save 500,000 women’s lives is a mere $7 billion dollars.  Here in the U.S. we have spent more than $915 billion since 2001 on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In 9 years, at a net cost of $63 billion dollars, less than 7% of the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,  the lives of 4.5 million women could have been saved. It would have been a bargain.

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Shortly after I posted this, I read that Ford just posted a quarterly net profit of $1 billion dollars.  We’re willing to spend our money on vehicles that guzzle gas that we shortly won’t have, but not on the more than 70,000 women whose lives could have been saved with that  same amount of money.  What does it say that we value cars and war far more than the lives of women?