Cancer? AIDS? Traffic accidents? Heart disease? Take a guess. Answer below the fold.
For European women aged 16-44 violence in the home is the primary cause of injury and death, more lethal than road accidents and cancer. Between 25% and 50% of women are victims of this violence. In Portugal 52.8% of women say that they have been violently treated by their husbands or partners. In Germany almost 300 women a year – or three women every four days – are killed by men with whom they used to live. In Britain one woman dies in similar circumstances every three days. In Spain it is one every four days. In France six women die this way every month: 33% of them are knifed, 33% shot, 20% strangled and 10% beaten (1). In the 15 member states of the European Union (before enlargement to 25), more than 600 women die every year because of sexist brutality in the family.”
I feel the need to highlight this for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the racist and orientalist views of many Westerners — views that afflict the left and the right alike (although I’m gonna put it out there that I think they afflict the right more). There is a pervasive mentality that we’re the “enlightened” ones, that we live in evolved and modern societies, and that the feminist movement has largely succeeded in securing equality and is therefore no longer useful. Any time a group like Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch criticizes the United States or Western Europe, or when feminist bloggers write about attacks on our domestic rights, there is a chorus of voices saying, “But it’s so much worse over there!” The “over there” inevitably is “somewhere east of here, where brown people live.” And certainly many things are bad “over there,” whether we’re talking about Afghanistan or Somalia or Saudi Arabia or China or Malaysia or Kenya. But there’s no hypocrisy or shame in trying to clean your own house and criticize that which is closest to you as you simultaneously examine other societies. Women in Saudi Arabia are told — and tell eachother — that it’s so much worse in Afghanistan, they shouldn’t complain. That simply isn’t an effective argument; injustice everywhere needs to be dealth with, on every level. Which doesn’t mean that we ignore the plight of women in the Mid-East and in Africa. It just means that we don’t “help” them by acting as colonizing feminist missionaries; we don’t pretend that we live in a perfect gender-egalitarian society and tell them that they should follow our example step-by-step. It means we allow them to seek equality on their own terms, as we aid them with the resources they need, no strings attached. It means that we don’t fold to cultural relativism: We recognize the importance of culture and tradition, but we also recognize that any value in that tradition is always and without exception surpassed by the importance of human dignity and the basic right to live autonomously. It means that we don’t stop when things are “good enough” or “better than they were.” And it means that we take to task those who claim to spread “freedom” worldwide, while trying to take it away from women here and there.
And because I am not nearly as eloquent as The Great Patriachy Blamer, I’ll leave you with wise words from Twisty:
Of course, you and I don’t need Ignacio Ramonet to tell us that the epidemic of violence is not just limited to bride killings by rural primitives in India and Africa; we are patriarchy-blamers, and we know what time it is. But there is no doubt that we do need loud proclamations reminding us of the suffering of non-European women whose advocates in the West are few and far between.
I say this because our racist conceits are more thoroughgoing than we care to admit. As I have oft opined, Americans display a notably high tolerance for the suffering of others, especially when those others are brown. Like white dudes and their birthright of male privilege, Westerners are indoctrinated from birth with a sort of first-world entitlement. This allows us to keep “exotic” cultures at arm’s length, to luxuriate in a cavalier unfamiliarity with their strange, primitive ways, and ultimately, to think of them as ideas rather than people, as less real than we are, and therefore less important. My own unscientific, blog-centric survey, based on the much-lower-than-average number of comments generated by posts that focus on violent misogyny in “third-world” countries, is that even seasoned patriarchy-blamers are rather less outraged by ritual stonings in Pakistan or mass rapes in Rwanda than they are by Dove soap’s attempt to pass off skinny white models as fat girls.
Educated European honkys are whacking their fair share of wives and girlfriends. Dudes in Botswana are whacking them, too. Assholes in India are trading them for goats. Godbags in Saudi Arabia are throwing acid on them. All over the world, in fact, women are getting the shit kicked out of them every single day, and the international community needs to step up and call the thing what it is: an epic human rights catastrophe. Every moment that passes without such a declaration is a moment that all women pass as marginalized, objectified, despised sub-humans.