22 November 2008
Musing on the international state of women
7 March 2007
Te Waha Nui Online
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So there it was, International Women’s Day at last - March 8, 2007 - and I was reading the paper and musing on the inter/national state of women.
First of all – happy news! Romanian orphan and his adoptive mother back in NZ.
Alana Cleland’s love and commitment to raising her adoptive son Iani in relatively benign New Zealand won the day. The unhappy side of the news – for anyone who saw the excellent local documentary - was the absolutely heart-rending sight of Iani’s Romanian-Gypsy birth-mother.
Through Iani’s articulate and sweet birth-father we saw the grim awfulness of their extreme poverty. The birth of 11 children, talk of the ones they couldn’t raise. But the mother was utterly, miserably silent. She and her family paid the price of her nation’s public policy and Europe’s historical designs - for the oppression of her people, genocide, and sociopathic Ceaucescu’s policy of making contraception and abortion unavailable, in an environment where economic survival for many was impossible.
A both happy and sad story involving mothers and children: Snatched girls: legal action to be dropped.
A Canadian custodial mother let her Lebanese ex-husband take their two preschool aged daughters to Australia with him on holiday, where he ran off with them to Beirut. The children were rescued and returned to their mother, but very bad news that an Australian and New Zealander are still in jail for being the paid help to get them back.
Which brings us to news involving more young women, more news of gang rapes, more horrible violent female deaths. This time in Pakistan. Rasheeda Begum, a Pakistan teen is wonderfully frank.
“I am really ashamed that I was born in such a society,” she says. She is fighting for her right not to live a life of slavery and repeated rape (called “forced marriage” by some, but I also like to be frank) because a man is claiming her as bounty for her long dead father’s gambling debt – which I hasten to add her mother actually paid off in cool cash!
The annual report of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan in February says Pakistan had 565 ‘honour killings’ in 2006 – twice as many as the year before according to the news item.
But how to contain so many women wanting domain over their lives? One woman gets hacked to death for allegedly flirting, a Punjabi woman is shot in the head for not wearing a veil. (By a man who had been previously exonerated for murdering four women working in the sex industry. He was sure on a roll!)
Back in Auckland I had a conversation with a local community constable. A lovely man, a picture of his wife and baby on the desk. We didn’t discuss Rickards wanting reinstatement, or police batons, but he did manage to slip in that where he came from (Zimbabwe) women seemed to accept that men were “the dominant species”.
And that it is natural for men to use their greater physical strength to keep women in line. (Those awfully irregular genes governing dominance and submission - how they play up!)
It is very strange having intelligent even compassionate conversation with another human being who thinks he is naturally dominant. (Should I have been bowing my head in his presence?)
But what should I have said to him that would have made a difference? He wasn’t a student of mine, not my son, not my brother, God forbid anything more intimate like friend or lover, he was ‘just’ a policeman. (And a kind policeman at that.)
His world view just happens to include men being born to rule in the public and private domain.
 Photo: Del Robie. |
Meanwhile in Wellington – a cordon of female police officers protect the supposedly threatened headquarters from upset women marchers.
What were they upset about? Misuse of power, gang rapes of young women, the perception of an unfair justice system weighted against women.
Fold up the paper, put it away. That was my news on International Women’s Day. How was yours?
Related links to women’s rights in Pakistan:
- Father gambles away daughter in poker game - 27 Feb 2007
- The woman who dared cry rape – 19 June 2005
- Shame of honour killings in deeply divided nation – 30 May 2006
- Pakistan: Tribal justice system must be abolished or amended - Amnesty International
