While we continue to pour billions down the drain fighting ‘terrorism’ and the ‘enemy’, we continue to harm the women of Afghanistan by fomenting a continuing state of militarism with only lip service and a pittance of funding given to help them to fight the very real terrorism of violence against women. Via RAWA:

As the world marks International Women’s Day, ambivalence, impunity, weak law enforcement and corruption continue to undermine women’s rights in Afghanistan, despite a July 2009 law banning violence against women, rights activists say.

(WARNING–VERY Disturbing film)

A recent case of the public beating of a woman for alleged elopement – also shown on private TV stations in Kabul – highlights the issue.

In January domestic violence forced two young women to flee their homes in Oshaan village, Dolaina District, Ghor Province, southwestern Afghanistan. A week later they were arrested in neighbouring Herat Province and sent back to Oshaan, according to the governor of Ghor, Mohammad Iqbal Munib.

“One woman was beaten in public for the elopement and the second was reportedly confined in a sack with a cat,” Munib told IRIN.

According to the governor, the illegal capture of the women was orchestrated by Fazul Ahad who leads an illegal armed militia group in Dolaina District. Locals say Ahad, a powerful figure who backed President Hamid Karzai in the August 2009 elections, has been running Oshaan as his personal fiefdom.

“When the roads reopen to Dolaina [closed by snow] we will send a team to investigate,” said the governor, adding that he was concerned that arresting Ahad could cause instability. “We have asked the authorities in Kabul for support and guidance.”

IRIN was unable to contact Fazul Ahad and verify the charges.

Self-immolation in Afghanistan

Domestic violence, forced marriage and lack of access to justice force some Afghan women to commit self-immolation and suicide.

“I poured fuel over my body and set myself ablaze because I was regularly beaten up and insulted by my husband and in-laws,” Zarmina, 28, told IRIN. She, along with over a dozen other women with self-inflicted burns, is in Herat’s burns hospital.

Over 90 self-immolation cases have been registered at the hospital in the past 11 months; 55 women had died, doctors said.

“People call it the `hospital of cries’ as patients here cry out loudly in pain,” Arif Jalali, head of the hospital, told IRIN.

Beneath the cries lie cases of domestic violence and/or disappointment with the justice system.

“Self-immolation proves that the justice system for female victims is failing,” said Movidul-Haq Mowidi, a human rights activist in Herat.

Barriers to justice

Despite laws prohibiting gender violence and upholding women’s rights, widespread gender discrimination, fear of abuse, corruption and other challenges are undermining the judicial system, experts say.

“Women are denied their most fundamental human rights and risk further violence in the course of seeking justice for crimes perpetrated against them,” stated a report by the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan on the situation of Afghan women in July 2009.

Orzala Ashraf, a women’s rights activist in Kabul, blames the government: “Laws are clear about crimes but we see big criminals thriving and being nurtured by the state for illicit political gains,” she told IRIN, pointing to the government’s alleged failure to address human rights violations committed over the past three decades of conflict.

“Because no one is put on trial for his crimes, a criminal culture is being promoted: violators have no fear of the law, prosecution and a meaningful penalty,” said Ashraf.

Deep-seated ambivalence to women’s rights is evident from a law signed off by President Hamid Karzai in early 2009: The Shia Personal Status Law, dubbed a ‘rape legalizing law’, was amended after strong domestic and international pressure.

“The first version [of the law] was totally intolerable,” said Najia Zewari, a women’s rights expert with the UN Fund for Women (UNIFEM). “Despite positive changes in the final version, there are articles that still need to be discussed and reviewed further,” she said.

Another example of this ambivalence is the case of the men who threw acid in the faces of 15 female students in Kandahar city in November 2008: Karzai publicly vowed they would be “severely punished” but court officials in Kandahar and Kabul have said they are unaware of the case and do not know where the alleged perpetrators are.

“Judges say the men were wrongly accused and forced to confess,” Ranna Tarina, head of Kandahar women’s affairs department, told IRIN.

Violence database

Over the past two years more than 1,900 cases of violence against women in 26 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces – from verbal abuse to physical violence – have been recorded in a database run by the Ministry of Women’s Affairs and UNIFEM.

One recorded case is the murder, by her in-laws in Parwan Province north of Kabul, of a young woman who had refused to live with her abusive husband. Another is the regular physical and mental torture meted out to a woman by her husband and mother in-law in Kabul.

“The database does not give a perfect picture but it helps to highlight some of the common miseries of Afghan women,” UNIFEM’s Najia Zewari told IRIN.

UNIFEM is keen to make the database publicly available on the internet.

“Violence against women is not a new phenomenon in Afghanistan but it is good to see crimes do not remain confined to a home and a village,” said activist Orzala Ashraf.

Last night I had a speaking engagement in a part of downtown that quickly becomes deserted after dark.  After the program ended, as a matter of course I waited to leave until another woman, one of my co-presenters,  was ready to go.  I can’t speak for her, but for me, it just went without saying that I didn’t want to walk out into the dark parking lot by myself.  I was dressed for the stormy weather, bundled up, sensible shoes, hardly provocative, but as Amanda Hess points out,

Acting like a woman, in many ways, involves performing behaviors that are out of the ordinary: shaving your entire body, coloring your lips and cheeks, lengthening your eyelashes, extending your legs on high heels, “doing” your hair, dieting obsessively, waxing, plucking, padding your breasts, painting your nails, stuffing your tummy into tight spandex casings, wearing skirts and dresses and pantyhose and earrings. The behaviors associated with femininity occupy a strange space in our culture. While they are obsessively reinforced as “normal” behaviors for women, they simultaneously work to situate women as abnormal, different, “other.”

To the average heterosexual cisgender man, refraining from performing these behaviors is just a fact of life. For women, these feminizing behaviors are enforced from birth, and are extremely difficult to avoid. And when women do refrain from performing these behaviors—when they don’t shave their body hair, don’t cinch their waists and inflate their breasts, don’t teeter on high heels, don’t wear makeup, and don’t wear skirts, just like men don’t—they risk being dismissed as “abnormal” women. In a culture where the privileged experience of the average heterosexual cisgender man is the baseline for “normal,” women are seen as outsiders no matter how they act.

And so when a woman is sexually assaulted—no matter what she’s doing—it’s easy for the culture at large to insist that she’s done something out of the ordinary to bring it upon herself. Because women’s lives are out of the “ordinary.” Because heterosexual cisgender men are born with the privilege of not being systematically targeted as victims of sexual assault. When you say that women who wear too-short skirts, or too-high heels, or too much make up are not sufficiently protecting themselves against rape, what you are really saying is that women who act too much like women deserve to be raped. When you say that women who drink with the boys, or have casual sex like the boys, or walk alone like the boys are not sufficiently protecting themselves against rape, what you are really saying is that women who don’t act enough like women deserve to be raped. And what you are really saying is that women deserve to be raped because they’re women. In a culture where women’s behavior is viewed as alien, it is this attitude that qualifies as “normal.”

When it comes to sexual assault, every neighborhood is a bad neighborhood for a woman.

This particularly resonates with me, because one of the first moments of click when it came to figuring out what the Feminist Peace Network was about was walking out onto a deserted street in Washington DC after a discussion with a member of FPN a few months after we had formed and realizing that while discussing the impact of militarism on women in Afghanistan (this was in 2002) was important, the reality was that women everywhere were terrorized by having to consider whether it is safe to walk to the subway or collect firewood or anything else, regardless of whether they live where there is peace or war every day of our lives.

And we are not immune from this danger in our digital lives either.  There have been several Facebook pages lately that have portrayed violence against women as entertainment. One group called “Punching pregnant women in the belly is fun” had members who were children. The group was reported to the school that the children listed on their profiles and the page is now gone. Earwicga explains,

It is particularly important to challenge the teenagers views that these types of groups are a bit of fun and trendy.  The results of a recent NSPCC study highlighted how prevelant sexual and physical violence in adoloscents:

The study suggested a quarter of girls aged 13 to 17 had experienced physical violence from a boyfriend and a third had been pressured into sexual acts they did not want.

The children’s charity said it was alarmed by the number of young people who viewed abuse in relationships as normal.

If you find other examples of Groups or Pages on Facebook promoting violence, please report them to Facebook and you can also list them on a Facebook page created to combat the problem.

As I write this, I realize that I am incredibly weary from having to even think about these things.  While I live in a place that is far, far safer than if I were living in a tent in Haiti or a refugee camp in Darfur, the reality is that I am still vulnerable to violence simply because I am a woman, and while I may take precautions when I can, neither I or any woman should have to do so.

That we cannot collect water or firewood, or walk to our car or the train or simply walk outside for a breath of air without fearing for our lives belies the very definition of civilization. Sexual violence and harassment of women is a global pandemic.  The damage it does is profound and it is time, well past time, that everyone, men and women say enough, no more and as importantly, we need to be clear with our children that this is not entertainment or what normal should be.

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.

While Hillary Clinton others Iran, talking tough about how Iran might trigger a nuclear arms race (never mind that companies like Halliburton have been more than happy to supply them with the means to do so) and become a dictatorship (which we only denounce when it is in our so-called political best interest to do so), women in Iran are offering substantive ideas for changing the Iranian paradigm as if women mattered.

Jailed Women Activists In Iran

Via the Women’s Forum Against Fundamentalism in Iran (WFAFI):

A group of Iranian women activists issued a statement listing their own solutions to the current crisis in the country. They maintain that the proposals put forth by opposition leaders, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi “neglect” the demands of women. Some of the jailed women activists: Iran Arrest of 19 Activists from the Women’s Movement, Women Journalists and Civil Activists Iranian women have been a very key part of the opposition movement.

The statement lists: “annulment of all discriminatory and anti-women laws, recognition of women’s right to their body and mind, ending violence against women and prosecution of all perpetrators of the crimes committed in the past thirty years” as solutions for exiting the current crisis.

They add that women’s issues are a major part of the current crisis and “no solution will be effective” without recognizing and trying to resolve these issues.

The statement also supports general demands such as “freedom of thought, speech and assembly.” While calling for an end to torture and the death penalty, they also express their support for “the immediate and unconditional release of all political prisoners.” Some of these demands are similar to those included in the proposals by Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi.

The statement emphasizes that the demand of the women community “is not changing the president or limiting the power of the leadership; but rather the realization of fundamental and structural changes.” Shadi Amin, Golrokh Jahanguiri, Fariba Davoudi, Shadi Sadr, Mahboubeh Abbasgholizadeh and Shahla Abghari are amongst the signatories of this statement. Women have played a major role in the recent protests in Iran and scores of women’s activists have been detained and imprisoned for their participation in the protests.

In November, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi condemned the violent treatment of women by government forces during the protests.

Demands included in the statement:

1. Abolishment of all discriminatory laws against women including divorce rights, marriage age, polygamy, inheritance laws, testimony, etc.
2. Recognition of women over her choice of clothing and body. This include freedom of wearing or not wearing the veil, and, abortion rights.
3. Abolishment of all forms of violence against women both at home and in publish, this includes abolishment of honor-killing.
4. Separation of church and state.
5. Prosecution of all the officials engaged in crimes against humanity and women in the past three decades.

See also here and here.