War, Women and Children: An uncomfortable truth

War, Women and Children: An uncomfortable truth

First, some stats:

According to the United States Census U.S. and World Population clock as of September 15, 2013, the total world population is around 7,111,521,000, with a radio of 1.01 males to every 1.0 female. Total female estimate as of July 2013 is 3,523,843,881.

Two thirds of the world's work is done by women, on average, and half of all the food produced in the world, although in many poor countries, women perform up to seventy percent or more of the work, and produce eighty percent of the food.

Women account for just over 10 percent of corporate officers in the 500 largest corporations in the USA.

Women give birth, feed families, carry water, and collect fuel though this is not counted as work.

Ninety percent of all rural female labor forces are called "housewives" and are excluded from the formal definition of economic activity.

In both developed and developing countries, women work 35 to 40 hours more than men every week.

Women produce 80 percent of the food on the planet, but receive less than 10 percent of all agricultural assistance.

Women make up 82.3 percent of employees in Export Processing Zones (EPZs), which are tax free industrial areas for foreign companies and where labor laws are often suspended and workers unprotected. In 1995, there were EPZs in 60 countries around the world, mostly in Asia.

There is no country in the world where women's wages are equal to those of men.

Women own approximately one percent of the world’s land.

Seventy percent of people in abject poverty (living on less than $1 per day) are women.

Only five percent of women in need of microcredit access are receiving it.

Most women alive today are denied voice or power over the most fundamental human decisions, such as whether or not to have sex and when to bear children, to get educations, or to go to work.

In early 2000, only nine women were heads of State or Government.

Twelve percent of the world's total parliament seats are held by women.

Women’s representation, on average, was highest in Western Europe (21percent) and in the “developed” regions outside Europe (18 percent). Only Nordic countries and the Netherlands have at least one third women parliamentarians.

Everyday approximately 6000 girls are genitally mutilated - more than 2,190,000 per year.

Every year in India, 5000 brides are murdered or commit suicide because their marriage dowries are considered inadequate.

In the US, one in four women will be victims of sexual assault and/or incest in their lifetimes. A woman is raped every 3 minutes. One in four women is beaten by a man.

Sixty percent of American women report having experienced rape and/or physical assault in their life-time and 10 women are murdered by batterers every day.

In Russia, half of all murder victims are women killed by their male partners.

Israel, Japan, Trinidad & Tobago, Brazil, Pakistan, Peru, Argentina, Costa

Rica, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Ecuador and Tunisia each have less than 10 shelters for battered women.

Two-thirds of the world’s 876 million illiterates are women.

Primary school enrollment among girls in the developing world is six percent lower than boys’ enrollment.

Secondary school enrollment among girls in the developing world is only 41 percent, whereas enrollment of boys is 53 percent.

For every year beyond fourth grade that girls go to school, family size drops 20 percent, child deaths drop 10 percent, and wages rise 20 percent; yet, the aid dedicated to education is declining.

Women make up 29 percent of world Internet users. In the Philippines, Croatia, France, Sweden, Australia and the USA, they represent more than 40 percent of all users.

In times of conflict women and children routinely are sold into forced servitude, sex and sweat shop slavery. MOST female children in the world are sexually assaulted before the age of 14.

In the former Yugoslavia, 20,000 women and girls were systematically raped by both sides of the conflict during the first months of the war.

Seventy-five percent of the refugees and internally displaced in the world are women who have lost their families and their homes and are plagued by sexual violence while in flight, in refugee camps and/or during resettlement.

Women form the majority of poor people in Canada – one in five Canadian women (2.8 million) lives in poverty.

Single mothers and other “unattached women” are most likely to be poor, with poverty rates for those groups reaching as high as 56 percent for single mothers under 65, and 49 percent for unattached women over 65 years of age. Single mothers are maligned in ALL cultures as are their children. Raped and gang-raped women are routinely beaten, criminalized, and put to death.

Single mothers with children under seven experience poverty rates as high as 82.5 percent and single mothers under age 25 have a poverty rate of 83 percent. Most fathers of their children do not tend to experience poverty.

Thirty-three percent of Aboriginal women, 28 percent of visible minority women, and 21 percent of immigrant women live below the low-income cut-off. As well, 25.2 percent of all adult women with disabilities live below poverty lines.

Women and children comprise most of the world’s homeless populations, particularly in the U.S.

In 2000, fifty-five percent of all women ages 15 and over had jobs, compared to 42 percent in 1976.

In 2000, twenty-eight percent of all employed women worked less than 30 hours per week compared with just 10 percent of employed men. The earnings of women employed full-time were equivalent to 73 percent of what men earned that same year, and half of those working women were single and raising multiple children.

The bottom line is this:

Women have a brutally sad human history and present, and what is considered to be equality for most women remains unattained or very limited. Woman and children also comprise the largest living human populations on earth. Women and children, both past and present, are also the largest slave populations on earth. I repeat: The largest populations of slaves, both in history and in the present, are women and children.

As such, women and children need to demand an end to war, violence against women and children, sexual violence and exploitation, and an end to the black market buying/selling/trafficking of women and children; all male-dominated businesses.

The clear lack of women’s contributions in global cultures, religions, economics, education, and in international relations is all but obvious in the world’s refusal to allow women’s input and cultural participation, and global poverty and war is the DIRECT result of that refusal.

War is a direct result of male aggression and competitiveness and the obvious lack of women’s influence. Equally, women and children are particularly vulnerable to the viciousness of male-dominated global warfare and the training of its conquerors.

As such, all war needs to be criminalized. Violence upon women and children needs to be seriously criminalized with ACTUAL expectations for justice and not just circular, philosophical, think tank semantics that go nowhere for centuries. The women and children of the world have had enough of this history-long game of unending human violence, which are the means and methods of men. You are destroying the planet, all life upon it, all natural resources, all human health, and all potential for sustenance, happy families and productive lives. You justify EVERY war, EVERY atrocity, the use of EVERY weapon system, and you IGNORE the ongoing BRUTALITY to women and children all over the planet. You INSIST upon unending warfare while IGNORING and JUSTIFYING the cruel and violent results to more than two-thirds of the world’s population, women and children.

Equally, it is all but ASTOUNDING and PATHOLOGICAL that you also INSIST upon yourselves being spiritual leaders of women and children in EVERY culture while JUSTIFYING bloodshed, violence, carnage, theft, and victimization; exploitation, enslavement, and violence upon women. You have IMMEASURABLE credibility problems, and we are sick, violated and tired of your war games. STOP! STOP justifying your universal criminality. Stop CELEBRATING bloodshed. None of you have legs to stand on at this juncture in human and biological history. You are destroying all of life, and for the record, ALL religious leaders are responsible for the brutal and sad history and present of women and children because you are uncomfortable with the FACTS and TRUTH of male behavior. You are quick to judge women, but rarely do you address the repeating and barbaric crimes of your gender; instead, you justify them, fact. You must stop before your games destroy all life on earth.

Sources: http://www.wallworkshop.com/pdf/Statistics_on_Women.pdf

-WomenWatch, The UN Working for Women: Who is Who at the UN

(http://www.un.org/womenwatch/un/who/htm, 02/04/01);

- Statistics Canada, Women in Canada 2000: A Guide to Understanding the Changing Roles of Women and Men in Canada (http://www.statcan.ca/english/ads/89-503-XPE/hilites.htm, 02/04/01);

- Women and International Development: Statistic on women 1997-1998 (http://www.womensedge.org/development/womenstats1998.htm, 05/04/01);

- “Female Genital Mutilation” (June 2000). World Health Organization Fact Sheet #241 (http://www.who.int/int-fs/en/fact241.html);

- “Nations Worldwide Support a Women’s Right to Choose Abortion”(March 2000), CRLP Publications (http://www.crlp.org/pub_fac_atkwwsup.html);

- Azza Karam, et al.,Women in Parliament: Beyond Numbers (Stockholm, Sweden: International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, 1998);

- “UNICEF Executive Director targets violence against women”, UNICEF web site (http://www.unicef.org/newsline/00pr17.htm);

- Joni Seager, The State of Women in the World Atlas (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1997);

- The World’s Women 2000: Trends and Statistics (New York: United Nations, 2000);

- “Women and Poverty: Fact Sheet”,Marika Morris, CRIAW, Spring 2000 (http://www.criaw-icref.ca/Poverty_fact_sheet.htm);

- United Nations, The World's Women 1995: Trends and Statistics (New York: United Nations, 1995);

- Heyzer, Noeleen, ed., A Commitment to the World’s Women: Perspectives on Development for Beijing and Beyond. (New York: UNIFEM, 1995);

- United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 1999 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999);

- United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 1998 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998);

- United Nations,Women: Looking Beyond 2000 (New York: United Nations, 1995);

- United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 1995 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).