From: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu (Rich Winkel)
Subject: STORIES FROM HALF THE WORLD
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: PACH
Date: Thu, 8 Oct 1992 08:15:09 GMT

/** gen.newsletter: 147.0 **/
** Topic: The ACTivist 8#10, October 1992 **
** Written  9:32 pm  Sep 24, 1992 by web:act in cdp:gen.newsletter **
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necessarily those of ACT for Disarmament.

IN OTHER NEWS TONIGHT: STORIES FROM HALF THE WORLD

By Maggie Helwig
The ACTivist

Consider some recent events.

* On September 16, Human Rights Watch released a report on the 
almost 2,000 domestic workers in Kuwait who have fled their 
employers' houses after being sexually assaulted, since the country 
was 'liberated' in March 1991. This averages out to about 4 women 
every day, for a year and a half, being driven from the houses where 
they live and work. Many of them cannot afford to return to their homes 
and have taken refuge in their embassies, or wherever else they can find
 shelter. We can safely assume that countless others have suffered 
assaults but been afraid or unable to leave. Throughout Kuwaiti society, 
rape and sexual assault seem to have assumed almost epidemic 
proportions ever since the 'liberation.'

* In Thailand, a group of Burmese women are being held in 
detention centres while their fate is negotiated. These women had 
been lured from border villages and put to work in the sex trade, living 
in prison-like conditions. Many of them are now HIV-positive. Last April,
 when another group of HIV-positive women were sent back to Burma, 
they were murdered by cyanide injection by the Burmese military
 dictatorship, the SLORC. Given the choice between possible murder at 
the hands of the SLORC and life in prison in Thailand, these women 
seem to have nowhere safe they can go.

*Arab/Palestinian women living in Israel have organized themselves 
to set up a crisis hotline and women's shelter. Not only do these women
 suffer under the Israeli occupation, they also say that "the number of 
Arab women suffering as a result of domestic violence or rape has ... 
reached crisis proportions. Arab women in Israel, more so than Jewish
 women, still tend to hide their suffering inside their homes, in fear of 
shame and humiliation, retaliation from their husbands, or repudiation 
by family and society.  To prevent further beatings, the break-up of 
family ties and negative effects on their society, Arab women endure
 violence and abuse in silence."

* In Canada this month, a Saudi woman went into hiding in Montral 
when the Refugee Board issued a deportation order (see below). The 
young woman had applied for refugee status on the grounds of gender
 discrimination. A number of Iranian women who have asked for 
refugee status on similar grounds have also had their claims rejected, 
though one woman who was able to prove she had been flogged for 
not wearing a veil was permitted to stay.

Also this month, Dularie Boodlal was ordered to return to Trinidad, 
to a husband who had slashed her with razor blades, beaten her 
severely and repeatedly threatened to kill her. Dularie, after an 
intense campaign, was allowed landed immigrant status, but the rules 
were carefully bent in such a way as to create no precedent for other 
women in her situation. 

And on September 18, Toronto newspapers reported the arrest of 
several men who had kept a group of teenage girls as prostitutes, 
'disciplining' them with stun-guns and whips. The girls had first been
 drafted into the sex trade in Halifax -- one of the country's most 
militarized communities, with a thriving sex industry around the naval 
base -- and then moved through several different cities across Canada.

In an often-quoted statement, Virginia Woolf said, "As a woman I have 
no country. As a woman I need no country. As a woman my country is 
the whole world." But, far too often, only the first sentence seems to be 
true. Women indeed have no country, because there is no country, 
nowhere, in the world that we are safe, that our lives and rights are 
treated with respect. All too often, women facing discrimination, 
violence, even murder, find that we have nowhere to go.

Indeed, if there is one thing that unites the governments of the world, 
it is their refusal to consider sexual assault, domestic violence, forced
 prostitution, and the denial of reproductive rights as full-scale human 
rights violations.

This, when the majority of the world's refugees, the world's casualties 
of war, the world's torture and murder victims, are women.

And this, when the majority of the world's grassroots workers for 
human rights, the protection of the environment, and sustainable 
and humane development, are also women. This when, lacking 
recognition from any of the world's governments, we have gone ahead 
and organized to save our own lives despite them. 

Few of the stories above made it in the 'mainstream' media (some 
appeared in the Lifestyles section of newspapers). But they are *our* 
stories, and all of us, women and men, must recognize them -- and act.

** End of text from cdp:gen.newsletter **

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