Never Be Silent

From the Philadelphia Inquirer, excerpts:

Helene Gayle, who heads CARE USA, believes her Atlanta-based agency has one answer: Build schools in the world’s troubled regions, including Afghanistan. Educating children, including girls, helps to lift people from poverty, which, in turn, contributes to stability and peace…

The most encouraging news about the schools that CARE supports in Afghanistan - nearly 300, so far - is that none of them has been attacked by the benighted forces that oppose girls’ education or by insurgents who have gone after schools built by the Afghan government. A report released in November - “Knowledge on Fire: Attacks on Education in Afghanistan” - documented an “alarming trend” of violence against schools. As a result, hundreds of schools were closed, and parents in some regions hesitated to send their children to schools that remained open.

Because of CARE’s community-based approach, Gayle said, “we’ve been able to keep our schools up and running. [Communities] feel that this is their school, not a government school.”

While Gayle worries that a return of the Taliban could once again eradicate girls’ schooling, she hopes that communities will push against that antediluvian view. “Hopefully, there’s been a long-enough period of time when girls have been educated that families have seen the value,” she said.

abbyjean:

thecurvature:

Trigger warnings, obviously. Disturbing stuff.

“i grope to teach women the dangers of doing things that could get them groped” ?!?!?!?!? awesome logic, groper sir.

Brandon’s favorite part of groping appears to be rendering her powerless to respond: “there was this one occasion in which i groped a young lady at a danzig show,” he writes. “after screaming ‘you grabbed me’ into my ear and i responded that i couldnt hear her, she gave up.”

Fucking infuriating.

From the UN Development Fund for Women:

• There is a direct link between increased female labour participation and growth: It is estimated that if women’s paid employment rates were raised to the same level as men’s, America’s GDP would be 9 percent higher; the euro-zone’s would be 13 percent higher, and Japan’s would be boosted by 16 percent. [1]
• Women’s nominal wages are 17 percent lower than men’s.
• Women perform 66 percent of the world’s work, produce 50 percent of the food, but earn 10 percent of the income and own 1 percent of the property [2].
• In some regions, women provide 70 percent of agricultural labour, produce more than 90 percent of the food, and yet are nowhere represented in budget deliberations [3].
• In Mexico, women in paid employment devote an additional 33 hours to domestic chores per week, while men’s weekly contribution six hours [4].
• If the average distance to the moon is 394,400 km, South African women together walk the equivalent of a trip to the moon and back 16 times a day to supply their households with water [5].
• In Arab states, only 28 percent of women participate in the workforce [6].
• OECD Official Development Assistance (ODA) for gender equality has tripled in 2006 compared with 2002, going up from US$2.5 billion to US$7.2 billion. This has meant an increase in the proportion of total ODA from 6 to 8 percent.

From the UN Development Fund for Women, excerpt:

The victims in today’s armed conflicts are far more likely to be civilians than soldiers. Some 70 percent of the casualties in recent conflicts have been non-combatants — most of them women and children. Women’s bodies have become part of the battleground for those who use terror as a tactic of war — they are raped, abducted, humiliated and made to undergo forced pregnancy, sexual abuse and slavery. The 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) is the first treaty to expressly recognize this broad spectrum of sexual and gender-based violence as among the gravest breaches of international law.

• One in three women will have experienced rape or abuse in her lifetime.
• In the U.S., 600 women are raped or sexually assaulted every day.
• For women aged 16 to 44, violence is a major cause of death and disability, higher than cancer or automobile accidents.
• 70 percent of casualties in recent conflicts are civilians, mostly women and children.
• Studies show that in tough economic times, girls more likely to be first in their families to go without food and be pulled out of school
• Violence by intimate male partners worsens the longer men are jobless.
• According to 2009 figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 37 percent of the 49 million Americans facing hunger are households with children headed by single mothers.
• In 2008, governments spent a staggering $1.464 trillion worldwide in military budgets, a 45 percent increase from 1998. The US accounted for nearly half. Meanwhile the entire budget of the United Nations amounted to $27 billion, a mere fraction of the global military budget.
• In 2008, the U.S. government spent $706 billion on defense, including supplemental war spending in Iraq and Afghanistan. In contrast, the US allocated $7.278 billion on global health programs.