Blue and yellow - and purple, green and red - are the colours of an abused woman.
Before I continue I should point out that I'm not myself a beaten woman (if I were I would probably not write about it to start with) but fighting domestic violence, or violence against women in general, is a cause I support. I have a friend who's been working with women's rights and domestic violence for a long time - she's now heading a project called Centre for Relationship Violence in Stockholm - and I have followed some of the developments in terms of policy and legislation for work.
According to the UN definition (1993 declaration), violence against women is:
- - Violence targeted at women on the basis of sex/gender
- - Violence that cause or can cause physical or mental suffering or bodily harm
- - Violence that mean threat, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of freedom
- - Violence against women refers to abuse, rape or sexual exploitation
- - Mental violence refers to sexual harassment or sexual humiliation at workplaces or in schools, in media, press and advertising
- - Violence against women is a breach of human rights
Violence against women occurs everywhere around us. Amnesty illustrates this by shrinking the world to a village with 1,000 inhabitants and providing some frightening and sad statistics:
- - 500 are women; it would be 510 but 10 were never born due to sex-related abortion or died as infants due to neglect
- - 300 are Asian women
- - 105 are illiterate
- - 145 live on less than a dollar a day
- - 167 are being beaten or in some other way exposed to violence during their lifetime
- - 100 will be raped or experience an attempted rape during their lifetime
More about domestic violence (source: Amnesty):
- - At least one out of three women or as many as a billion women in total have been abused or forced to have sex during their lifetime. Often the perpetrator is a family member or someone she knows.
- - Approx. 70% of female murder victims are killed by their male partner
- - It is estimated that in Kenya more than one woman a week is killed by their male partner; in Zambia it is five women a week by a male partner or family member.
- - 35% of Egyptian women are abused by their husband at least once during the marriage
- - In Bolivia 17% of women over 20 have been subject to physical violence in the last year
- - In Bangladesh all murdered women have been killed by their partner
- - In Pakistan 42% of women are said to accept violence as part of their fate and 33% feel too helpless to put up any resistance. 19% say that they have protested and 4% that they have acted in some way.
- - In Canada the costs for violence against women have been estimated to be 1.6 billion dollar per year including medical care and decline in production
- - In the USA a woman is abused every 15th second, often by her partner
- - In New Zealand 20% of women are beaten or mentally abused
- - In Russia 36,000 women are abused on a daily basis by their men or partners
- - In Spain one woman is killed every five days by her male partner
- - In the UK two women a week die at the hands of their male partners.
There is also specific sexual violence (still Amnesty figures):
- - One of five women in the world will be subject to rape or attempted rape during their lifetime
- - In South Africa on average 147 women are raped day
- - Rape occurs every 90th second in the USA
- - In France 25,000 women are raped every year
- - In Turkey 35.6% of women have been subject to violence within marriage, 16.3% say that it has happened on several occasions
More statistics, e.g. for violence against women in wartime and harmful practices such as female genital mutilation, are available on Amnesty's page.
So what do states do about it?
In many countries it is not even considered a crime; cases of violence are often not even investigated or punished. Some facts:
- - In 2003 at least 54 countries had laws that discriminated against women in some way (based on a report from the UN rapporteur on violence against women).
- - 79 countries have no or unknown legislation against violence in the home
- - Rape within marriage is recognised as a specific crime in only 52 countries (read for example about new, depressing legislation allowing this in Afghanistan here)
- - Only 16 countries have legislation that include specific references to sexual assault
- - Only three countries have legislation that specifically headline violence against women as a criminal category in itself (Bangladesh, Sweden and the USA)
- - In Bolivia, Cameroon, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, Lebanon, Peru, Romania, Uruguay and Venezuela a rapist will not be punished if he asks the victim to marry him and she accepts
- - The concept "honour" as extenuating circumstances (partly or fully) exists in penalty codes in Peru, Bangladesh, Argentina, Ecuador, Egypt, Guatemala, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, the West Bank and Venezuela.
What about Sweden then?
According to the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention, reported case of abuse against women are increasing (up 34% in the last decade) - both because more and more women go to the police and because there is more violence. Some facts and figures:
- - In 73% of the cases the woman knew the culprit (2007)
- - The share of attacks (where the victim does not know the perpretator and it happens outdoors for example) has decreased with 12% (2006) and in 17% of cases of rape there is no close relationship
- - In 2006 the prosecutor gave a restraining order in 4,294 cases
- - There were 2,500 reports of abuse in 2007
- - In 2007 5,850 persons were suspects in connection to abuse against women. In the majority of the cases (around 4,750) the woman and the man knew each other. In 85% of those cases the suspect was a man (compared to 64% men where they don't know each other).
- - 21% of all cases were settled (solved) (23% for known perpretator and 15% for unknown)
- - According to estimates only 20-25% of violence against women in close relationship are ever reported to the police
We should also remember that not just women are victims of domestic violence, also children, both directly and indirectly. Save the Children/Rädda Barnen has done several excellent commercials about this:
I also believe that prostitution is a form of violence against women. I don't agree with those who say that "it is the world's oldest trade bla bla..." or that "they have chosen to do this bla bla...". I recently read a disturbing article about the "business prospects" for prostitutes in Copenhagen in connection with the climate conferences taking place there this year (one climate and business conference a couple of weeks ago and of course the big international climate conference in December). At the recent conference one prostitute said she had "a crazy rush" for business; "the politicians also need to relax after a long day"... Denmark has not criminalised sex-buyers (NB! not selling but buying, based on the assumptions that the prostitutes themselves are victims rather than criminals) like Sweden (1999), Norway (2008), Finland (pending) and Iceland (2009) and does not seem to be heading that way anytime soon.
Finally I just want to say that I'm not saying that all men are like this! I happen to have a wonderful man in my life and I know most of you out there do too. Violence against women in something that men and women have to fight together! It's a cause we should all support. I also want to say that I'm aware of the fact that there are women who abuse men, and violence in same-sex couples - this is for example why my friend's project talks about violence in relationships rather than just violence against women. That said, most of their clients are women who have been abused by men.
