The current strife in Kosovo has thousands fleeing for refugee camps. A large majority of the refugees possibly 80 percent or more are women and children, and women will bear the greatest burden, says a University of Louisville anthropologist who teaches a course on refugees. Julie Peteet says women tend to be responsible for their families in refugee camps. Husbands often are at war or are grappling with their inability to support their families after being forced from jobs.
Families are less likely to help financially because resources are stretched too thin.
Women also are extremely vulnerable to sexual assault, since prosecution is unlikely and women often are reluctant to tell their stories, Peteet says. The advent of a new and improved kind of genetically modified human being will be inevitable in the centuries to come, Stephen Hawking, the British astrophysicist, said recently. I am not advocating human genetic engineering as a good thing, Hawking said during a colloquium organized in Cambridge, where he teaches mathematics and physics at the University. I am just saying it is likely to happen in the next millennium whether we like it or not, he added. The astrophysicist, best known for his work A Brief History of Time, suffers from a motor neurone disease, is wheelchair bound and has been unable to speak naturally since 1985.