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For All Humans
Being a woman myself, you can probably imagine I have a few thoughts on the matter. Any conversation about women is like any conversation about humanity. No single fact applies to everyone, and some will invariably be left out of the conversation. We’ll do our best to include as many voices as possible. And what an incredible array of voices there are.
Consider how the voice of a Pakistani child earned her a place on the Taliban’s hit list and a bullet in the head. Malala Yousafzai fought no battles, fired no guns, and harmed no one. All she did was speak out for the right to go to school.
Consider the voices of Rosa Parks and Viola Desmond, two women who refused to bow to the racist conventions of their cities. Parks declined to give up her seat on the bus to a white man, and Desmond insisted on sitting in the main section of a movie theatre instead of the balcony where black people were supposed to sit. Both were arrested for their trouble, and Desmond was injured in the process.
Consider the voices today that are still not heard: 40 million internally displaced people, 25.4 million refugees, and 3.1 million asylum seekers—most of whom are women and children fleeing violence and certain death, often running headlong into the arms of more violence or starvation. What would these voices say if we bothered to listen? These voices seldom reach us amidst the noise and clamor of politicians and gunfire.
What we have instead are numbers. Big numbers like the ones I just listed. But big numbers are hard to wrap our minds around. So we give these statistics sterile names like “gender-related killings” to avoid thinking too hard about them. Here’s another: 137 women are killed every day by a partner or family member. The BBC quotes the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in saying that “home is the most likely place for a woman to be killed.” In other words, nowhere is safe for her—not even home sweet home.
Neha Pathanja et al. conducted a review published under the title The Experience of Intimate Partner Violence Among Older Women. Their results, covering multiple countries including Albania, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, the USA, and Australia, found that older women face unique barriers to seeking support due to ill health or dependency on the perpetrator for care or income. Older women may also be less aware of available support. The voices of these women are seldom heard as they may be silenced by their abusers.
In place of voices, here are more statistics. A research paper called Development of the Human Rights of Women in Cultural Milieu highlights the development of women’s rights in cultural settings like Nigeria. It states that two-thirds of illiterate adults are female. In Togo, the Ministry of Education prohibits pregnant schoolgirls from attending school. Instead of addressing the issue of young girls becoming pregnant, they are forbidden from returning to school.
The paper also found that every state in Africa is a party to at least one international treaty prohibiting discrimination based on sex in the enjoyment of human rights. However, these treaties seem to largely pay lip service to the concept, as women’s rights continue to be violated daily.
Let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that first-world countries in the West are shining examples of women’s freedoms. A 2018 Women in the Workplace study by LeanIn.org and McKinsey & Co. shows that America has made almost no progress in this area since 2015. Women, especially women of color, remain underrepresented in leadership roles. Only about one in five C-suite leaders is a woman, and only one in 25 is a woman of color.
Here’s another number: eight. That’s how many extra months per year a Black woman in America would have to work to make her wages equal to that of a white man.
Among all these numbers, we raise our girls in a world where they’re often more valued for their looks than their intelligence or abilities. A Woman’s Health Victoria paper found that over half of girls report being judged more for their appearance than their skills.
Violence against women is not just physical. Many girls don’t understand that it also includes verbal and psychological abuse. A Scottish survey found that one in ten women in the private sector had experienced physical or mental violence, including rape and sexual assault.
Is anywhere safe for women?
What does Islam say about all of this? People often associate Muslim women with inferiority or oppression, but this is far from the truth. Many so-called “Muslim countries” use pre-Islamic cultural practices that violate women’s rights. However, Islam itself gave women equal footing with men centuries ago. The Quran, in Chapter 4 (entitled Women), outlines some of these rights, and the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) said, “The best among you is he who gives the best treatment to his womenfolk.”
There’s a common misconception that Islam permits men to beat their wives, but this is a mistranslation. Islamic scholar Dr. Zainab Al-Wani explains that the word “daraba” in Chapter 4, verse 34, actually means to separate or distance, not to strike.
So now that we know women are entitled to equal rights and freedoms, what should we do? Here at For All Humans, we believe that we must ensure all women get the rights they were given centuries ago. And to do that, it’s critical for women to be included in the dialogue. Let’s give women back their voices and their rights.
If we stop and listen to the women around the world, perhaps we’ll hear their calls for overdue justice.
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