Domestic Violence - An Increase

From the News Observer:

A Saudi judge told a conference on domestic violence that a man has the right to slap a wife who spends money wastefully and said women were as much to blame as men for increased spousal abuse, a Saudi newspaper reported.

The remarks do not carry the weight of law, as they were made out of court. But such public pronouncements by Saudi judges - who are also Islamic clerics - are often widely respected.

A rights activist decried the remarks and said she and other campaigners viewed them as the latest setback in women's efforts to gain the right to vote, drive, freely participate in politics and be protected from violence.

The comments at a recent conference were given as part of an explanation for an increase in domestic violence in the country. The judge said women were equally responsible for the increase, the newspaper quoted him as saying.

The paper did not say exactly when the conference was held. The judge could not be reached for comment on Monday.

Women in the audience loudly protested the judge's remarks, the newspaper said.

And from the Star Online:

The vast majority of Iraqi women face domestic violence on a regular basis and many commit suicide because of it, the United Nations said on Wednesday.

Iraq and the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan should take measures to stop violence against women, including honour killings and genital mutilation, the UN mission in Iraq, known as UNAMI, said in a regular report on human rights.

Iraq should "investigate incidents involving gender-based violence, in particular the so-called 'honour crimes' perpetrated against women, and take measures to ensure that persons found responsible for committing these crimes are held accountable and brought to justice", UNAMI said.

UNAMI said it was concerned about threats against women because of the way they dressed, and it repeated a statement from November that women were threatened by rape, sex trafficking, forced and early marriages, murder and abduction.

Mr President, Where Are the Women?

From Modern Ghana:

President Mills has responded to criticisms that he has reneged on his promise that 40 percent of his appointments will go to women.

The Tuesday, May 12, 2009 edition of The Statesman newspaper reported that only 11% of the president's appointments went to females.

Vice President of FIDA International and President of FIDA Ghana, Ursula Owusu, hinted that the association suspects the government is hatching a plan to hack off a few of the women officials appointed by the previous administration, including the Chief Justice Georgina Theodora Wood.

Deborah Devonshire

From Times Online:

The youngest and only surviving of the Mitford sisters is about to publish her second book of essays — yet she never went to school.

Her life has straddled a gilded age; by her teens she already knew Evelyn Waugh, Harold Acton and John Betjeman. “I think your generation are more dull, but we all think our contemporaries are the most glittering.”

Home to Roost by Deborah Devonshire is published by John Murray, May 14.

Ghana: Forced Marriages

From Muhammed Suraj Sulley Jawando in Modern Ghana:

Although great scholars have classified marriage in Africa as arranged marriage, it is predominantly forced marriage because the women are coerced or threatened into those marriages. Normally the objection of the bride or bridegroom is ignored. Such marriages are arranged not based on love, but for economic reason, bogus religious reason and reputation of the family.

Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares that, “men and women of full age have the Rights to marry and found a family. It should be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses”. I wonder if the government of Ghana knows this declaration and has started implementing it to stop this modern form of slavery that parents force their children into.

In recent times parents have disrupted and crumbled the relationship and education that took years to build, for economic reasons, to send their children into forced marriages. They tend to accept the men their children bring hope until someone approaches them about another man who is interested in their children and he is from a wealthy home or from abroad. The former becomes the enemy of the family, except the girl who still loves him, and the latter becomes the toast of the family, but an enemy to the girl he intends to spend the rest of his life with.

Religious connotation has been infused into the issue of forced marriage and cannot be differentiated from tradition. Yes a girl has to marry at some point in her life, but I'm yet to be shown a verse in the Holy Quran or Holy bible that teaches about forced, unhappy marriage or throwing our daughters into hot water to get them to accept the men we choose for them.

I cannot express my disappointment at the past and present government and legislators of the 4th Republic for not doing enough, by enacting laws that will protect these innocent and powerless girls.

US Supreme Court

From the Seattle Times Editorial Opinion:

THE five men who make up the conservative majority of the Supreme Court lose their heads over social issues. They become emotional, irrational, petty. You might even call them the weaker sex.

They could use a few good women to balance them out. But to insist that President Obama nominate a woman, period, is to miss the point. The court's lack of gender diversity relates to a bigger problem: The court lacks a sufficient number of judges who believe the Constitution extends to the ladies.

No question, I'd love to see more women on the court. Their presence is inevitable, since women constitute a critical mass in politics and law.

Still, it's offensive to treat gender as a requirement for Obama's next nominee rather than a plus factor. It's insulting to women, who are hardly interchangeable, and it's unfair to men, plenty of whom are quite capable of "getting it." Far better for Obama to target the court's weakness on equal rights and identify the most persuasive moderate around to help reshape the court's opinions.

Female Novelists

From the Guardian:

The postwar literary landscape has been dominated by the male giants of American letters. So where are all the women? Elaine Showalter chooses the best novelists writing in the US today.

But being free to write doesn't mean that American women are equal in a literary marketplace still dominated by male precedents, male literary juries and male standards of greatness. As Joyce Carol Oates has ruefully noted, "the woman who writes is a writer by her own definition, but a woman writer by others' definitions". She cannot transcend readers' assumptions about her gender "unless she writes under a male pseudonym and keeps her identity secret". Yet unlike their 19th-century British and European female precursors, American women novelists have very rarely used male pseudonyms, believing that democratic principles would win them respect.

Women writers generally fare very badly in competition for the Big One. In 2006, the New York Times asked 200 writers and "literary sages" to nominate the best single work of American fiction in the past 25 years. In his introduction to the survey, the Times critic AO Scott defended the exercise; even if the GAN is a mythical creature like the yeti or the sasquatch, he argued, many people still believe it exists. While Toni Morrison's Beloved topped the list, Marilynne Robinson was the only other woman novelist to receive more than two votes.

Mothers and Ministers

From News Journal:

The job descriptions for mother and minister can be difficult to distinguish — nurturer, counselor, guide and, yes, lecturer and sometimes scolder.

The pastor of McCrary's Chapel United Methodist Church in Liberty City, Austin provides a sweet influence to more than her own two grown sons, Channing and Bradley Bryant. She has a whole congregation of charges, and makes sure to conduct a children's sermon every Sunday.

The Rev. Virginia Wall remembers what her two grown children said to her when she was pondering the ministry. She said being a minister opens the door to guide her children, 29-year-old Crystal Fry and Terance Wall, 23, both of whom live in the Houston area.

The Rev. Carol Petty served as assistant rector at Trinity Episcopal Church in Longview until about two years ago when she left for another ministerial post. The Rev. Charlene Miller is head of schools at Trinity School of Texas, which is affiliated with the downtown Longview Episcopal church.

The Rev. Diana Casteel, pastor of St. Mark Christian Methodist Episcopal Church in Longview said Methodism welcomes women to the pulpit.

Women Heads ARMM Assembly

From the Inquirer:

It was the domain of men from the start. But on Thursday, a woman was catapulted to the helm of the Regional Legislative Assembly of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.

Tawi-Tawi Assemblywoman Rejie Sahali-Generale was voted in as speaker of the 25-member RLA, replacing Maguindanao Assemblyman Pike Mentang, a veteran regional lawmaker.

The lady legislator's ascension to the top RLA post as its 12th speaker is believed to be a rare case in what has been in recent tradition a male-dominated Muslim society.

Female Tamil Tigers

Eye-opening article from the Telegraph on the life of young female Tamil Tigers.

Ajanthi got to her knees, ready to dash across the road, then abruptly fell backwards, her arms and legs splayed awkwardly. Blood spurted from the centre of her forehead, soaking her auburn hair. In shock, the air left my lungs and I could not inhale it back. Ajanthi had been my friend since primary school and we had joined the Tigers together. She had been hit by a sniper.

I crawled forward holding my AK-47 with both hands, desperate to reach Ajanthi and drag her to safety. To my right, two comrades were trying to drag Muralie, who had also been hit, through the wet grass. His blood-soaked body kept slipping through their hands. As I reached Ajanthi our unit commander, Sudharshan, yanked me by the collar, dragging me with him.

News of our arrival spread quickly, and a curious crowd assembled along the sides of the lane. Most had never seen female Tigers before. An old woman flung her bony arms around me: 'Ayyo, my poor child! Wouldn't your mother's heart break if she saw you like this?' I didn't realise then how I must have looked – a starved teenage girl with torn clothes, caked in blood, barefoot and carrying an automatic rifle. Most villagers wanted us gone. If the enemy soldiers knew we were still around, they were sure to attack the village.

I had joined the Tigers to make a stand against my country's oppressive government, but now found myself at war with those who had come to maintain peace. It seemed that we might be destroying our only chance of resolving the situation peacefully.

And this confronting story, again from the Telegraph, about young women, some as young as 11yo, fighting as Tamil Tigers.