Femicide: The Greatest Human Rights Violation for Women in Honduras

From Honduras Weekly:

The femicide epidemic continues unabated in Honduras, with the discovery in the past week of the bodies of 12 women nationwide murdered by relatives or unknown assailants. According to Human Rights Commissioner Ramón Custodio, approximately 2,400 women have died violently in Honduras since 2002, including a total of 351 in 2010, compared to 407 in 2009 and 252 in 2008, based on data from the country's National Institute for Women (INAM). One femicide case is registered every 48 hours in Honduras. "One of the findings, up to now, is that 70 percent of the victims ranged in age from 15 to 40 years, although those most exposed to dying violently are women between 20 and 24," said Mr. Custodio. Of that figure, "83 percent were the victims of firearms, 14 percent of sharp instruments, while the rest died from suffocation, strangling and from other violent causes."

Mr. Custodio noted that femicide is "the greatest violation of human rights and the most serious crime of violence against women for the cruelty of the perpetrator in mutilating, dismembering or leaving marks on the body of the victim."

Femicide is defined as "the systematic killing of women for various reasons, usually cultural". While the word "femicide" is relatively new in Honduras, volence and sexual abuse of women in the country has a long history, made worse by the fact that many of these crimes go unsolved or unpunished due to biases dominated by the culture of "machismo" that severely diminish the rights and status of women.

Elizabeth I - Virgin Queen? She was a right royal minx!

From Mail Online:

The England that the first Queen Elizabeth reigned over so gloriously for 45 years was obsessed with sex and awash with promiscuity. This unrestrained bawdiness was surprising for a nation that worshipped its head of state as an unblemished virgin.

By the standards of later ages — and even today — society then was especially open in its use of sexual language. Shakespeare’s plays are full of nudge-nudge references to rutting, scrambling, sluicing, ravening and lock-picking.

The playwright’s work mirrored and fed the erotic obsessions of the age. This was a land where prostitutes were known as Winchester geese because the Bishop of Winchester owned much of the property that housed London’s dens of vice.

Monogamy, chastity and celibacy must have been practised by some Elizabethans, but they were hardly the norm. And yet, at the helm of this vibrant and exciting nation — growing, getting richer, reaching out to new worlds — was a woman who suppressed her own desires.

She would not marry or have children, and remained for the 45 years of her reign the unassailable Virgin Queen.

An Anglo-Indian Tale

From IBN Live:

During the earlier period of the East India Company in India, it was a common practice for British men to take Indian women as wives, for the lack of British women in the country. The children of such inter-racial marriages were known as Eurasians. But as the 19th century progressed, British women began arriving at the sub continent, and the trend of inter-cultural marriages came to an abrupt halt. As a result, such Eurasians, also known as Anglo Indians, were neglected by both Indians and British.

This was among the interesting information that contoured the lecture on Anglo Indians as part of the Madras Week Celebration, held at the GRT Grand Days. Harry Mclure and Richard O Connor from Anglos in the Wind, a national Anglo Indian magazine, read out articles published in the magazine over the last 10 years, that capture the history and essence of Anglo Indians in Madras, especially in areas of Santhome, Royapuram, Perambur, Pallavaram. The lecture was an insight as to how a new community evolved and marginalised later with unfriendly environment.

The Family, Koseki, and the Individual

From the Asia-Pacific Journal - Japan Focus:

On 14 February, Kayama Emi and Watanabe Tsuguo filed an administrative appeal to have the rejection of their marriage application by Arakawa Ward, Tokyo rescinded.1 Ms. Kayama wanted to keep her surname after marriage, as did Mr. Watanabe. The court rejected the appeal after only ten days without hearing arguments. “I’ve never had a gate closed in my face so quickly,” said Ms. Kayama.

They are now demanding damages on the basis of sexual discrimination, a case that is expected to take two years in the Tokyo High Court. Their appeal is based on Article 24 of the Constitution, which guarantees gender equality and respect of individual rights in marriage, and Article 13, which guarantees the right to pursue personal happiness. In contrast, current law requiring married couples to have a single surname, either the husband or wife’s, is based solely on an “agreement” (goi) between the parties involved.

It is not only women in the workplace who are inconvenienced by misunderstandings around names. Men wanting to adopt their wife’s name also run into barriers, whether due to confusion involving names at the workplace, to opposition from the husband’s family if he is the oldest son inheriting property and tasked with carrying on the family name, or to social prejudice and jabs about being “adopted” by the wife’s family.

In Search of Cleopatra

From CBS News:

She has been celebrated in film, immortalized in paintings and sculpture. And more than 2,000 years after she lived, Queen Cleopatra VII, who ruled the sprawling kingdom of Egypt for 22 years, is still a mesmerizing force.

"I just think it's hard to name another woman in history who is this commanding, and for that matter this enduring," said author Stacy Schiff.

So enduring that Pulitzer Prize-winning author Schiff's recent biography of Cleopatra became a bestseller.

Seems we can't get enough of a Queen who had liaisons and children with two Roman legends - Julius Caesar and his loyal general Mark Antony - and was the wealthiest person of her time.

Shiff said her riches equaled that of all the hedge fund managers of yesteryear, rolled into one.

You might be surprised to learn that Cleopatra didn't come from a long line of Egyptians. She was descended from the Greek General Ptolemy, who served under Alexander the Great.

Victims of Mennonite “Old Colonies” in Bolivia

From Mennonite Weekly Review:

In a trial that ended with eight convictions Aug. 25 in a Bolivian court, prosecutors said that in 2005 a veterinarian in the isolated community altered a substance that sedates cows for use on humans. He and a gang of eight, the suit claimed, spent the next four years terrorizing the community by spraying the concoction through bedroom windows at night, drugging entire families and raping any females inside.

It would be a shocking accusation for any community to handle, but it has threatened to divide one of the world’s few remaining Mennonite “Old Colonies”: 130 women and girls from ages 8 to 60 have come forward as victims, affecting about one third of the community’s families. And the crime, the way the community has responded to it, and the trial itself point to much deeper troubles for women in such reclusive sects.

An Old Colony woman’s place is in the home. Her schooling ends at age 12, and while many of the men eventually learn Spanish through their inevitable contact with the outside world, few women learn to speak anything but Low German.

Deeply entrenched patriarchy pervades this scandal. The victims told their husbands or fathers of foggy memories and pains, but the men didn’t believe them, and no investigations were ordered, allowing crimes to flourish for years. The scandal did not finally blow open until June 2009, when one woman caught two of the defendants entering her house.

Anniversary of 19th Amendment

From Campbell Patch:

Today is the 91st anniversary of the 19th amendment to the US Constitution taking effect, giving women the right to vote. It's a milestone in the Women's Suffrage Movement in the United States and one that still resonates with modern women.

Christine Cole Catley

From the New Zealand Herald:

I was told she was a publisher and writer, but it would have been more accurate to say she was a general force in New Zealand letters and society over 60-odd years. She was a down-to-earth doyenne, and most recently, a North Shore nexus. She knew everybody over three or four generations - and approved enthusiastically of most - from Douglas Lilburn to Rena Owen ("a most determined woman, very funny. I like Rena a great deal"); Janet Frame to "lovely, lovely" Ranginui Walker; Denis Glover to Kevin Milne to James K. Baxter (and his mother).

She's done too much to even start listing here but, after her death at age 88 last Sunday (writing and publishing to the last), many of her achievements have been listed elsewhere. For Cole Catley belongs to a certain category of people whom I admire enormously, and facetiously canonise into a "Renaissance Pantheon": people who have the talent, but more importantly, the curiosity and the energy to be Of-All-Trades.

Archaic Laws Regarding Women Repealled

From RedBank:

When governing bodies enact legislation in any era, it’s done with the expressed interest, one can only hope, in being not only fair and just, but representative of an entire citizenry.

Well, about that. Sure, men, namely white men, have acted in what they believe have been the country’s best interest since, um, forever, but that’s a difficult notion to honestly believe considering just how unequal representation has been since, um, forever.

On Monday, State Sen. Jen Beck (R-12) announced that several obsolete statutes concerning the status of women, enacted well before women had the right to vote, have been repealed from New Jersey State Law.