(The Conversation) – Last month, the Taliban passed a new “vice and virtue” law, making it illegal for women to speak in public. Under the law, women can also be punished if they are heard singing or reading aloud from within their homes.

It was approved by the Taliban’s supreme leader, Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, and will be enforced by the Ministry for Promoting Virtue and Preventing Vice.

Ahead of an international conference on the future of Afghanistan in Doha, Qatar, earlier this year, the United Nations’ mission head for Afghanistan, Roza Otunbayeva, said it would “take time” for the Taliban to accept women. The Taliban specifically mandated no women attend the conference, which the UN agreed to.

But as gender experts have been saying for years, Taliban leaders have not – and will not – change. Three years after they regained control of Afghanistan, the Taliban’s efforts to publicly erase women from Afghan society have reached a new low.

Gender apartheid

The Taliban’s burgeoning body of laws and practices restricting the rights of women and girls is a clear case of gender apartheid. Gender apartheid is defined as a regime of systematic gender-based oppression and domination.

Because there is no conventional legal framework in place in Afghanistan, the country is ruled by an increasingly tightly woven patchwork of decrees, policies and systematised practices, some written, others verbal.

Since returning to power in 2021, the Taliban has enacted more than 100 edicts, orders and directives restricting the rights of women and girls. These apply in a range of jurisdictions – nationally, provincially and in specific districts.

The most significant of these edicts prevent women and girls from attending school beyond grade six, working in many organisations, and travelling a certain distance to seek health care.

Restricting girls’ education

The ban on education for Afghan girls has had a dire effect on their wellbeing. Modelling from UN Women shows this has correlated with a 25% increase in child marriage and 45% increase in early childbirth. The loss of hope for young women has been profound.

Civil society groups in Afghanistan and around the world have clapped back at the Taliban’s ban on girl’s education with the hashtag “Let Afghan Girls Learn”.

Myriad small organisations are also running underground schools to continue girls’ education. Sometimes these schools operate under the guise of embroidery classes, or something else the Taliban finds acceptable.

But the ongoing lack of funding to women-led organisations has been a serious barrier to these kinds of programs, despite the fact they are primarily Afghan-led.

A range of internationally certified online programs have also been established, providing important educational and employment opportunities for smaller numbers of Afghan women and girls.

But these online options remain limited, and not just by funding. Data shows only 6% of Afghan women have internet access, and the Taliban is making it increasingly difficult for Afghans to access SIM cards for mobile phones.

Hurting women and children’s health

Women’s health has also suffered due to the brain drain of highly-skilled workers fleeing the country and the sharp reduction in international technical and financial assistance to Afghanistan’s public health system.

Human Rights Watch reports “women and girls have been disproportionately affected by the healthcare crisis” in the country, particularly because of the Taliban’s abuses of women’s rights.

For example, restrictions on women’s movement has meant that maternal and infant mortality rates have skyrocketed in recent years as women are prevented from reaching health facilities.

Data published in the British Medical Journal shows that eight in ten women in urban areas have reported symptoms of depression and/or anxiety living under the Taliban.

Fighting against the silence

Over the past year, the Taliban have also increasingly targeted women’s human rights defenders. Activists have been “disappeared”, arbitrarily detained, and egregiously abused in prison.

The Guardian recently published evidence of a woman being raped in prison.

In my own work, I’ve documented a pattern of Talibs using sexual torture against imprisoned women’s human rights defenders in a bid to shame them out of their activism and isolate them from familial and community support.

Yet, Afghan women continue to push back against the draconian authorities ruling the country.

In response to the latest “vice and virtue” law, for example, women all over the country have taken to social media posting videos of themselves singing and reciting poetry to show they cannot be silenced.

Some recite the Quran. Many wear traditional Afghan dress, while others wear the Taliban’s required burka. But they sing to prove they exist. To show they are Afghan, and that they are not impure, regardless of what the Talibs say.

Activists are also continuing to push for the international recognition of gender apartheid as a crime against humanity, and the International Criminal Court continues its investigations into alleged crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Taliban.

But Afghan women cannot be left alone in their struggle. The international community must follow through on its commitments to protect Afghan women’s rights defenders. It must also maintain long-term support, including through funding pathways, for women-led organisations helping women in Afghanistan.

Susan Hutchinson, PhD Candidate, International Relations, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

——

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

‘Becoming a doctor is my dream’: Afghan women continue studies in Scotland | AFP

A person can only be born in one place. However, he may die several times elsewhere: in the exiles and prisons, and in a homeland transformed by the occupation and oppression into a nightmare. -Mahmoud Darwish

Newark, Del. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – A few days before the invasion of Iraq by American forces under G.W.  Bush, on March 16, 2003, a young woman from Seattle, Washington, who had gone to Rafah, in Gaza to help Palestinians halt the demolition of homes died under the bulldozer of the Israeli army.  

Her name was Rachel Corrie. 

She was 23 years old. She was a member of the pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement (ISM) 

Her parents fought the judiciary system in Israel for two decades to no avail.  The court rejected their appeals, and no one was prosecuted.  It is the usual case in Israel, the only “democracy” in the Middle East.

On May 11, 2022, the renowned Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, while reporting at the Jenin refugee camp and having reported from the occupied territories for nearly 25 years, was shot in the neck by IDF while reporting for Al Jazeera.   It took more than a year for the Israeli officials to admit that their army was responsible for her death.   Was anyone put on trial for her murder?  No. 

She was wearing a blue vest with the word Press on it.  An Israeli solider shot her just below her helmet.  While her funeral was being held, all kinds of barriers were set to prolong the procession.  She was finally laid to rest in the Mount Zion cemetery in Jerusalem where she was buried next to her parents.  She was a Roman Catholic.

On September 7, 2024, a young woman also from Seattle, this time a Turkish American aged 26 had gone to the West Bank for the very same reasons.  She was shot in the head by the Israeli Army.

Her name was Ayşenur Eygi.

She was also a volunteer with the ISM and had recently graduated from the University of Washington.  She and others including many Jewish activists had been demonstrating against an illegal outpost called Evyatar, an offshoot of the settlement of Beita. 

She had arrived there only two days before her untimely death by a gunfire of an Israeli soldier. Jonathan Pollack, an Israeli peace activist, participating in Friday’s protest was an eyewitness. He held her bleeding head before the ambulance arrived.  She died at the hospital.

She, like Rachel, had a full life ahead of her. 

Not only did these women want a better world but they also put their aspirations into action. They could have had a career like so many others but instead they took a different route: To be instrumental in making a change in this very unjust world of ours. 

Rachel had been born into a middle class, peace-loving family.

Ayşenur was born into a Turkish American family. She resisted and struggled for the right of a people whose livelihood and land were being stolen by settlers, guarded by the most immoral army in the world.

She was shot to death like countless others since and before October 7. 

The Americans and the Israelis did nothing to secure justice for any of these women. 

 In another part of the Middle East, on 16 September 16, 2022, a young woman named Mahsa Amini, also known by her Kurdish name Jina, went to Tehran with her brother and friends to have a good time.  She was twenty-two.   She was stopped by the morality police and taken to a van by force.  She was interrogated viciously for not having the right hijab and was hit hard on her head.  She was taken to the hospital and a few days later, after going into a coma, she was pronounced dead.  She was not political.  Her only sin was that her attire was not to the liking of the authorities.   What followed later after her shocking death was the largest uprising in Iran called Woman Life Freedom, perhaps the largest feminist movement in our time.  

Photo by Inimafoto A: https://www.pexels.com/photo/plate-with-a-slogan-woman-life-freedom-14413071/

In the Middle East and elsewhere, women have proven that they will take to the streets and encounter the oppressors to fight for freedom whether for others or themselves. 

It will not be the last time nor the only time.

Just like a century ago,  Mary Harris Jones—aka “ Mother Jones ” who was also called “the most dangerous woman in America”,  walked miles to fight for freedom and the rights of workers,  these young women also took their fight to the streets of Jerusalem, Rafah, the West Bank, Tehran and elsewhere to prove that women will not be stopped — not by guns, by bulldozers nor intimidation.

(The Conversation) – Until the collapse of Afghanistan’s US-backed government in August 2021, few knew clearly what the Taliban wanted once they had returned to power. Some western officials and observers hoped for a big change from the regime, which had governed the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate in the 1990s.

This time, they hoped, a more sophisticated and pragmatic vision might have replaced the Taliban’s previously extremist approach.

Some also argued that the rest of the world had a moral responsibility to approach Afghanistan’s new rulers with cautious optimism. Engagement should be the key. Anything else risked condemning the country and its population to isolation and economic hardship.

Others weren’t convinced.

During the negotiations that led to the February 2020 Doha agreement, the Taliban’s position on post-settlement Afghanistan’s politics remained ambiguous. The group continued this vague posture during the subsequent intra-Afghan dialogues with the former Afghan government.

Then, appearing in a press conference three days after Taliban forces took control of Kabul, its spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid, appeared to give reassurances the new regime would respect women’s rights “within the norms of Islamic law”.

In the ensuing three years, the Taliban’s fundamentalist regime has continued to suffer from weak legitimacy, despite taking pains initially to cultivate a conciliatory image compared to its harsh rule in the 1990s.

However, what had appeared to some be Taliban 2.0 has increasingly looked like the old, harsh and fundamentalist Taliban as the regime has grown more confident in its hold on power.

Since 2021, Hibatullah Akhundzada, the leader of Afghanistan’s Islamic Emirate, has gradually issued more than 50 decrees that affect most areas of society.

Many hard-won achievements under the former republic, such as freedom of expression and the press, have been suppressed. The regime has forced into disappearance, imprisoned or murdered many former government members, despite announcing a general amnesty.

“Burqa,” Digital, Midjourney / Clip2Comic, 2024

In their treatment of women, including forbidding education after the age of 12, restrictions have become so harsh that the resulting subjugation has been labelled “gender apartheid” by many journalists, academics and activists.

Many female students have had to flee the country. Most recently a group of women medical students made the news after they were granted scholarships to go to UK to complete their studies.

The regime has also revived public executions and flogging reminiscent of their 1990s practices. An edict issued in March 2024 stated the regime will also resume public stoning.

The regime has now introduced a series of new “vice and virtue” laws, to be enforced by the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (PVPV).

Until now, government has been mainly by decrees from the Taliban leadership. But these, while giving an indication of the regime’s increasingly extremist and authoritarian nature, have not been accompanied with details of how they should be enforced. This uncertainty could, at times, allow local authorities a degree of leeway, including the ability in some cases to ignore decrees when it suits.

But the recent law chnage removes these ambiguities, empowers the Taliban’s morality police and is enforceable on everyone residing in Afghanistan.

Blueprint for oppression

The new laws are particularly harsh on women. They enforce the wearing of the hijab and stipulate this garment must be made of thick enough material to fully cover a woman’s face and body and avoid offering temptation to men.

Women’s voices are also deemed to be a source of temptation, so women are now not allowed to speak outside the family home. If a woman can be heard singing, even from within her own home, this is considered a violation of the law and can be punished. Women are even forbidden from looking directly at a man who is not their husband or blood relative.

Enforcement can be undertaken by anyone in society “who is capable”. Reports by two “trustworthy” individuals is enough to bring a prosecution. This is a worrying prospect, as it could lead to arbitrary accusations based on personal or political vendettas.

Officially enforcement will be carried out by the ministry’s appointees, the morality police or mohtaseb. “Fairness and kindness” are stipulated as guiding principles for how the new rules should be enforced, although these terms are not defined and the law is replete with subjective terminologies open to interpretation by those enforcing them.

New media laws introduced as part of the package prohibit “un-Islamic content” and empower the morality police to compel media officials to prevent the publication of content deemed contrary to Sharia and images of living beings. This last measure will effectively throw into doubt the future of TV broadcasting in Afghanistan.

The laws also forbid music in public and “un-Islamic” hairstyles. Men must grow beards at least as long as a fist. As a worrying sign for continued humanitarian engagement involving non-Muslim foreign workers, the law prohibits befriending, helping or imitating “nonbelievers”.

Violations will be met with on the spot fines issued by the mohtaseb or imprisonment for one-to-three days and prosecution in the regime’s courts for repeat offenders. The morality police also has the power to compel attendance at the mosque, with prosecution for those who do not obey, regardless of whether they pray at home.

As recently as June, Taliban representatives attended UN-sponsored talks in Doha at which spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid called for funds frozen by the west to be released and for the relaxation of sanctions on the regime. He dismissed western concerns over the regime’s treatment of women as “cultural differences”.

But these new laws have effectively removed any remaining differences between the current regime and its 1990s predecessor, a fundamentalist pariah that turned Afghanistan into an isolated outcast.

Kambaiz Rafi, Teaching Fellow in the School of Government and International Affairs, Durham University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

() – The world has long been aware of the scourge of apartheid — the systemic segregation or discrimination of people based on their race. But what about the institutionalized practice of singling people out for ill-treatment due to their gender?

The push to recognize “gender apartheid” under international law is gaining steam, with oppression against women and girls in Afghanistan and Iran fueling calls for immediate action, but tremendous obstacles remain.

What Do They Want?

Advocates want to clearly define gender apartheid as a crime under international law. Currently, only “persecution” on the basis of gender is recognized as a crime against humanity. But rights groups and activists say the concept of persecution does not fully capture the scope of the abuses committed under a system of institutionalized gender apartheid.

The goal is for the United Nations to make up for this gap by legally shielding women and girls from systemic abuse and violence.

Afghan women’s rights defenders are credited with being the first to articulate the concept of gender apartheid in the 1990s, during the Taliban’s first regime.

Since the Taliban returned to power in 2021, the hard-line Islamist group has reimposed its oppressive policies against women and girls, including severe restrictions on their appearances, freedom of movement, and right to work and study.

Hoda Khamosh, an Afghan women’s rights activist, says the recognition of gender apartheid would greatly benefit women’s rights in the country.

“We would be able to hold accountable the authorities and perpetrators of gender-based violence and discrimination against women,” Khamosh told RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi.

Meanwhile, Iranian women’s rights activists have said the institutionalized discrimination against women in the Islamic republic amounts to gender apartheid.

UN experts have said the violent enforcement of the hijab law and punishments on women and girls who fail to wear the head scarf could be described as a form of gender apartheid.

The international community made a mistake in allowing the Taliban to exclude the voices of women and civil society in a recent meeting in Doha.

By Tarique Niazi | –

( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – The United Nations recently hosted a third round of talks on Afghanistan in Doha, Qatar, to weigh the prospects for the country’s return to the international system. The talks were attended by special envoys on Afghanistan from 30 world nations, including the United States. That the world’s 30 leading nations have appointed “special envoys” on Afghanistan shows how concerning Afghanistan is to the globe. The UN sponsored the earlier two rounds in May 2023 and February 2024. Doha I and Doha II were, however, focused on the international obligations of Afghanistan’s de facto rulers, i.e., the Taliban regime.

The Taliban boycotted Doha I and Doha II, dismissing the “international obligations” as interference in Afghanistan’s internal affairs. Also, they refused to attend Doha III until the UN dropped human and women rights from its agenda, and barred Afghan women and civil society organization leaders from attending the talks. This capitulation is a step toward accepting the Taliban as the sole and legitimate representative of Afghanistan that they are not. The Taliban further snubbed the UN and participating countries by sending a delegation led by a low-level official, a government spokesperson, instead of their minister for foreign affairs.

To be fair, cutting and pruning the agenda around the Taliban’s demands was not an easy decision for the UN or special envoys to swallow. There is every indication that the decision irked UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, who earlier attended Doha I and Doha II, enough to abstain from Doha III. Many others were dismayed by the decision. The UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women was “deeply concerned” about the exclusion that it said “will only further silence Afghan women and girls.”

Human Rights Watch found the decision “shocking.” The Afghan Representative at the United Nations, who does not represent the de facto Taliban regime in Kabul and is a holdover from the pre-Taliban Afghan government, was “disappointed” at the decision. He urged the world to hold the Taliban to their international obligation of forming an inclusive and representative government in Afghanistan, engage with all Afghan stakeholders, not just the Taliban, and not look away from human rights violations in Afghanistan.

The U.S. Special Envoy on Afghanistan, speaking at the UN Security Council, lamented that “the harm caused by the Taliban’s restrictions on women and girls cannot be overstated,” noting “that it has now been over 1,000 days since it banned girls from secondary schools.” Yet he seemed more concerned with “Afghanistan’s reintegration into an international system,” and having the UN appoint a “focal point to begin producing a road map” to this effect.

The world, nonetheless, stays united refusing to recognize the Taliban government in the face of their misanthropic and misogynistic policies, which ban girls from seeking an education beyond sixth grade and women from employment even in women-only establishments and organizations. Even diverse nations such as China, India, Iran, Russia, and the United States speak with one voice. More importantly, the UN has refused to accept the Taliban regime as a de jure government that has been constituted and propped up against the will of the Afghans, and with the muscular power of a militia force, i.e., the Taliban.

DW News Video: “Outrage over women’s exclusion from UN-led talks with Taliban | DW News”

The global call on the Taliban to end their misogyny has not gone unheeded, though. There is now a growing chorus of voices, both loud and quiet, within the Taliban regime that wants the ban on female education lifted. One such voice is that of the Taliban’s Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Stanikzai, who initially was tipped to be the country’s prime minister but got pushed aside because of his outspokenness. He has long been challenging his government’s ban on female education, arguing that Islam makes it obligatory for both men and women to get an education. He calls the ban on women and girls’ education “oppressive and unjust.”

Quieter voices also oppose the ban, prominent among them the ministers for defense and the interior, who see the ban as inconsistent with international norms. Defense Minister Yaqoob Mujahid’s dissent carries greater weight because of his heritage. He is a son of the founder of the Taliban Movement, Mullah Omar, and is widely respected by the rank and file of the movement. So is Sirajuddin Haqqani, the minister for the interior, whose father Jalaluddin Haqqani is credited with crafting military strategies that, years later, paved the way for the Taliban’s return to power.

Who is, then, opposed to women and girls’ right to education and work? It is the Taliban’s Supreme Leader, Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, who is a recluse, hermit, blinkered, bigoted and inveterate misogynist with zero formal education, except for a few years of undistinguished religious instruction. Unlike many world scholars of Islam, Akhundzada has never traveled outside of  his birth country of Afghanistan and the remote village in neighboring Pakistan where he was in exile. This insularity has turned him into a literalist reader of religious texts. His medieval interpretations of Islam are rejected by every single Muslim religious scholar, including the world’s largest Islamic movement of Nahdatul Ulema in Indonesia, which boasts 100 million members.

Similarly, religious scholars in Cairo, Egypt, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia rebuffed Akhundzada’s orthodox reading of Islam. This universal repudiation has further turned him inward. He now refuses to meet with any visiting Islamic scholars. In parallel, he claims it is Pashtun culture, not necessarily religion, that doesn’t permit women to learn or work outside the home.

This citation of Pashtun culture did appeal to some. In 2021, Pakistan’s then Prime Minister Imran Khan, whose ancestors hail from Ghazni and Kandahar in Afghanistan, echoed Akhundzada’s position and urged the world to be understanding of Pashtun culture that discourages women’s education. His ambassador at the UN defended this stance saying that the Taliban’s ban on women’s education is part of Pashtun culture, which created a huge backlash. Afghanistan’s former President Hamid Karzai admonished Imran Kahn for peddling ignorance about Afghan culture. Afghan women, however, fared best under the Afghan communist regime (1979-1989), when 60% of university students in the country were women. The second best era for them was in 2001-2021, when 25% of university students were women.

If Pashtun culture were to blame for opposing women’s education, then Pashtun women in Pakistan would not be studying in co-ed schools, colleges, and universities. The Nobel laureate Malala Yousufzai, who risked her life for education, is a Pashtun. The 50 million Pashtuns in Pakistan outnumber the entire population of Afghanistan. Pakistani Pashtuns should be the true north of Pashtun culture, not Mullah Akhundzada.

Tragically, Afghanistan has fallen into the hands of those who are impervious to rational thought. Millions of Afghans have been fleeing their irrationality. Since 2021, 700,000 Afghans have sought refuge in neighboring Pakistan alone. How to stop Afghanistan from bleeding its best and brightest? All overseas Afghan assets, including the $7 billion that the United States has frozen since 2021, should be released only to Afghan women for their education. Any Afghan woman living inside or outside the country seeking higher education should be entitled to these funds. There are around 12,000 universities in India, Indonesia and the United States alone. If each of these universities offers one spot for them, 12,000 Afghan women can graduate every year. With an investment of just $7 billion, a million Afghan women can receive university education. This should be a realistic way to counter Taliban misogyny.

Unfortunately, the international community has provided the Taliban regime with $10 billion in “international aid and civilian support” since 2021, with zero accountability or transparency. The UN must engage with the Taliban to have them be accountable, transparent, meet their international obligations, and most importantly further women’s interests, i.e., their right to education, work, and public life. If the Taliban are responsive, they should be welcomed into the world community; if not, they should be shunned until they renounce their antiquated ideas. The Doha III meeting that shut out civil society and women’s voices was a nod to Taliban misogyny. This mistake needs to be undone, and soon.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

The war on women is everywhere: in the home, locally, nationally and globally.

Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – In 2018, the US National Sexual Violence Resource Center published that 81% of women reported experiencing some form of sexual harassment and/or sexual assault in their lifetime.  Further, the majority of violence against women is perpetrated by male intimate partners and acquaintances.

There are myriad other misogynist wars on women worldwide – including military wars; sex trafficking, prostitution and pornography; the theft of female and lesbian sexual identity by some in the trans movement; child marriage, female genital mutilation, and so on.  But none at this moment is so intensive as Israel’s and the US’ genocidal war on Gaza: 70 percent of those killed are women and their children.   Israel’s bombing of hospitals with maternity wards; the starvation of pregnant and breast-feeding women and the record-acute malnutrition among newborns and young children speak loud and clear — End Palestinian women’s potential to give life and the survival of Palestinian babies and children.

How cruelly ironic that as US weapons murder life in Gaza and elsewhere in the world with impunity, 14 US states have criminalized women’s choice of abortion as murder, not even allowing abortion for the hateful acts of rape or incest, six more states have early gestational limits. There were 65,000 rape-related pregnancies between July 2022 and January 2024 in those US states banning or putting extreme limits on abortion, with the end of Roe v Wade in the 2022 Dobbs’ Supreme Court decision.

Today a majority of US-adults including from every religion, race, ethnicity; moderate and liberal Republicans and a vast majority of Democrats (women and men), agree that abortion should be legal. Thus, the end of Roe v Wade in the 2022 Dobbs’ Supreme Court decision is a both a War on Women and a War on Democracy, given that the will of the majority of US citizens does not prevail nor influence government policy. 

According to the Economist, the United States ranks among “flawed democracies.”   Another recent, comprehensive study of democracies worldwide concluded that “only 15 percent of people globally live in places where women and lower income groups have at least somewhat equal access to power.”  No surprise that the US, cluelessly vaunted as the indispensable nation, is not one of them.

What fuels the control of women’s bodies in our country?  It is misogyny and injustice.  After all, there is no comparable moral or medical control of men’s bodies.

Yet the moralistic urgency to preserve life in the womb evaporates once a poor child is born.  One in six children under five years of age lives in poverty – the highest rate of all industrial countries; four million youth are homeless.  Clearly, controlling a woman’s right to her own body, is not about the unborn’s right to life; otherwise, all kinds of social legislation for maternal and child health, adequate housing, a living wage, and well-funded education would accompany legislation criminalizing women for abortion. 

Regarding women’s loss of economic democracy, women have higher rates of poverty than men.  And why?  For at least three reasons:

1.)   Domestic violence causes women victims to lose altogether an average of 8 million days of paid work per year and is a strong factor in women’s homelessness.

2.)    Women’s reproductive labor – giving birth, breastfeeding and caring for children is not compensated with free childcare and paid parental leave in the United States, unlike all other comparable countries. Thus, women who give birth are cheated of savings, pensions and Social Security.  No surprise then that the greatest risk factor for being poor in old age is having been a mother..

3.)   More women than men struggle to cover everyday expenses due to the gender wage gap, which has remained stagnant for 20 years – at 82% – a significant factor contributing to the substantial disparity in poverty rates between women and men age 75 and older.  Even for college graduates in 2024 the same economic inequality persists: male college graduates have been hired at an average sightly over $30/hour; women, at slightly over $25/hour. This wage inequality of 82% will follow these women college graduates all their working lives and in retirement.

Salary is symbolic: Why are we women worth 82% of men in the workplace?.

Ponderous realities:

More American lives were lost in the 20^th century through violence against women than during all 20^th century wars and civil strife.  Yet, while thousands of monuments throughout the United States honor those who lost their lives for their country in war, only one —the first of its kind—is currently being planned for women who lost their lives giving birth to the country’s children.  The counterpoint reality is that feminist revolutions to gain human rights and equality for women (however incomplete that goal remains) have freed and saved the lives of millions of women and girls—without weapons, without fists, and without a drop of blood spilled.  

Women have more than a lot that men can learn from: men commit 90% of homicides and almost all sexual violence; men are the primary wagers of war.  Were our skills, our social and intellectual intelligence, and our wisdom valued and promoted in all places of social and political decision-making: in every home and all national governments and the UN, the world might get a chance at global peace and restoring our beautiful planet.

*Given as the keynote talk at Bigger than Dobbs:  The War on Women and War on Democracy, a June 23 event sponsored by the Reproductive Justice Task Force of Franklin County Continuing the Political Revolution with multiple co-sponsors.  

Speeches of the presenters will be available soon at http://www.fccpr.us 

Related Video link added by IC: MSNBC: “How GOP may lose 24: Trump conviction collides with MAGA legal ‘war’ on women, minorities, equality”

Her action leading to the 6-day ceasefire recalled two women whose work for peace in the United States culminated in Mother’s Day on the second Sunday in May.  Prior to the Civil War, Ann Reeves Jarvis of West Virginia organized “Mothers’ Day Work Clubs” with classes for women on sanitation in food preparation and drinking water in a time of high infant and child mortality. After the war, she organized “Mothers Friendship Day,” bringing together mothers from both sides of the Civil War to support their reconciliation.

Julia Ward Howe, a passionate anti-war activist and promoter of world peace, inspired the first public “Mother’s Day for Peace” rally held in New York City on June 2, 1872. Her 1870 Mother’s Day Proclamation passionately heralded action to stop future wars:

“…Arise, all women who have hearts …

From the bosom of the devastated earth, a voice goes up with our own. It says, “Disarm, disarm!”’…

This recent Mother’s Day in Palestine, Mazin Qumsiyeh of Bethlehem University wrote “I remember my own mother who fought for peace” in the spirit of “Julia Ward Howe’s call for mothers on Mother’s day to end wars and stop sacrificing people on the altar of men’s racism, greed and egos.”

France 24 English Video: “Some 300,000 Gazans have evacuated east Rafah, Israeli army says • FRANCE 24 English

The current obliteration of Gaza is a record-breaking war on mothers and their children.

• An average of two Gazan mothers die every hour of the war leaving their families devastated and their children with diminished protection.
• After four months of Israel’s carpet bombing, more Gazan children were killed than the number of children killed in the last four years of wars around the world combined. 
• With starvation imposed on Gaza by Israel’s blockades of food aid –“unprecedented in modern history” – mothers and adult women are the ones who eat last and least.

• Many mothers are too malnourished to produce milk for their newborns; but no powdered milk in the markets and next to no clean water with which to mix it are available.
• Each day about 180 women give birth in hellish conditions, with most of Gaza’s 36 hospitals lying in rubble and their existing medical supplies nearing exhaustion. Two American trauma surgeons who have volunteered for surgical missions in crisis situations all over the world, stated recently that they have never seen cruelty like Israel’s massacre in Gaza.
• Some mothers have resorted to washing clothes and bathing their children in the sea, polluted with sewage, risking their lives under Israeli strafing.
• As of late February 2024, The U.N. estimated that some 700,000 women and girls in Gaza experience menstrual cycles but don’t have adequate access to basic hygiene products like pads, toilet paper, running water and toilets because of the war. These conditions put them at risk of reproductive and urinary tract infections.

Shahd Sataria, a human rights defender with the Palestinian Working Women Society for Development in the West Bank, visited Gaza every summer as a child until her family could no longer get a permit in 2004. “In Gaza, you got to visit the sea,” she recalled. “We are big families. We would gather at my grandma’s house, and sleep on old mattresses on the floor… those were great nights.”

She remembers the plants, the deep blue sea, nights full of stories, and a lot of singing. In the morning, the women of the family would gather around her grandmother, chatting.  Sataria couldn’t see her grandmother before she died, denied a permit to visit Gaza.

“Women have lost their chance to have education, to be in decision-making, and to be empowered.” Despite the horror of death, destruction and starvation, Sataria speaks of hope. “I believe that people in Gaza are resilient.  If the war would end today or tomorrow, I believe that they will rise up.”

This Mother’s Day my deepest desire for the surviving women of this genocidal war, is that they live to see their beloved Palestine become a member state of the UN with the resources to re-build, as Jewish women survivors of the Holocaust did with the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. 

No other peoples “have been kept stateless for so many decades” as Palestinians.  But the world must be with them not just in words but in deeds.

“ Half a year of unfathomable suffering.

Half a year of irreparable trauma.

Half a year of irreplaceable loss.

Every positive change in human behavior is always preceded by an expansion of consciousness, and Gaza is expanding western consciousness like nothing ever before.”

Both were 22-year-olds. Their deaths in 2023 serve as a reminder on International Women’s Day that the tragedies of femicide and gender-based violence (GBV) will continue into 2024. “Honor killings” need to be recognized as problems that are not only confined to the global south and developing world.

 While governments often react to direct violence, this problem will not end unless both state and society recognize endemic structural and cultural violence that enable femicide. The failure to act on these problems becomes a form of “necropolitics,” where the states allow women to succumb to the fate of femicide.

Direct Violence

Norwegian scholar Johan Galtung’s Triangle of Violence begins with “direct violence,” which often gets the most attention.

The father of Tiba Al-Ali projected direct violence against his daughter by strangling her. The last thing Tiba saw was the eyes of her father before she died.

Turetta projected direct violence against Giulia, a video camera capturing him beating her, and then later stabbing her 20 times to the neck and head. The last thing Giulia saw was the eyes of her ex-partner.

Tiba chose to defy her father.  Giulia chose to leave Filippo and she was graduating before him, which he could not accept.

Structural Violence

Cameroonian scholar Achille Mbembe defines “necropolitics” as how political actors allow certain demographics to die. When states fail to prevent femicide that is a form of necropolitics, or what Galtung would call “structural violence.”

Ali’s murder is part of the rise of GBV due to a revival of tribal culture that former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein encouraged after the 1991 Gulf War to maintain domestic order, as his security forces were diminished. Iraq’s gendered insecurity continued unabated as the security sector collapsed after the 2003 invasion.  The US touted post-Saddam Iraq as a model state that would inspire a wave of democratization in the region. Yet Articles 41 and 409 of the Iraqi Penal Code, to this day, permits males to “punish” female members of a household. Those codes are a form of structural violence and necropolitics, enabling “honor killings.” It allows “practices of patriarchy” at the state level.

Women’s rights in Iraq • FRANCE 24 English Video

Structural violence and state patriarchy is evident by the security sector failing to address this issue, as the police allegedly knew beforehand that Al-Ali’s life was at risk and failed to take action.

Let us turn to Europe. Surprisingly, the Italian state engages in necropolitics by not legally recognizing “femicide” as a separate crime. Cecchettin’s sister, Elena, referred to this problem when said, “Femicide is a murder committed by the state because the state doesn’t protect us.” The state’s failure in this case to prevent direct violence is itself a form of violence. In the absence of the state Elena refers to the need for Italian civil society and NGOs to step in: “We need to fund anti-violence centres and give the possibility to those who need to ask for help.”

After the murder, Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said she would increase funds to women’s shelters and anti-violence centers. However, Meloni was also part of the problem, since her misogynistic right-wing politics and “Brothers of Italy”(Fratelli d’Italia) party enabled gendered cultural violence in Italy.   

Cultural Violence

After the murder in Iraq, a twitter user, Ali Bey, wrote that women should “behave or face the same fate as Tiba Al-Ali,” along with a series of other voices in the Iraqi cybersphere condoning, if not celebrating the murder. These outbursts are examples of cultural violence or societal patriarchy that enables such crimes.

Elena links the murder of her younger sister to the patriarchal culture of violence that pervades Italy, a form of cultural necropolitics, which normalises the toxic behaviour of men like Turetta and eventually commits femicide. She said “Turetta is often described as a monster, but he’s not a monster.”  She then addresses cultural elements: “A monster is an exception, a person who’s outside society, a person for whom society doesn’t need to take responsibility. But there’s a responsibility. Monsters aren’t sick, they’re healthy sons of the patriarchy and rape culture.” 

Meloni promised promised a new educational campaign in schools to eradicate “the toxic culture of violence” in the country. While Meloni had condemned sexual violence in the past, it was usually when a migrant committed GBV, to support the anti-immigrant politics of her party.

In 2023 I conducted two digital autopsies on Tiba’s YouTube account and Giulia’s Instagram account. Both were beautiful souls that made the earth a better place. Tiba’s vibrant videos described her new life in Istanbul, to pursue her education. Guilia loved her mom, had a collection of beer bottle tops, and apparently had a fear of going to the hospital alone, but overcame her fear.  That fear apparently had to do with the fact that she was taking care of her mom who eventually died of cancer.

The triangle of violence and necropolitics offers a nuanced means of analyzing the agents of patriarchy.  But a simple linguistic exercise can also achieve this goal, using patriarchy as a verb instead of an abstract noun. We must each ask ourselves “Who or what has patriarched me or others in the past, present, and future?” and “Who or what have I patriarched?” Difficult questions, yes, but by bringing them into focus we can begin to identify the active agents and institutions that have patriarched and continue to patriarch in Iraq, Italy and the world.  On this International Women’s Day, Iraq and Italy have failed to ensure gendered security.

In the spirit of International Women’s Day, let’s look at a brief profile of women’s status today and the consequences for our country and the world.

If I asked my brothers, my many nephews, male friends and colleagues, did they think women are as capable as men, I wager that most, if not all, would say yes. Beyond doubt we women have all the talent, intelligence, and potential for leadership and political responsibility as men. But I have also learned from recent history that, in some cases – such as negotiating an end to conflict; working toward long-standing peace; and prioritizing health, education and social welfare in government – women outperform men.

I would go so far as to say that the fate of nations is tied to the status of women. Studies back this up. A team of researchers has created the largest global database on the status of women called WomanStats. Their findings are profoundly illuminating for global security and world peace. In a sentence: the degree of women’s equality predicts best how peaceful or conflict-ridden their countries are. Consider that feminist revolutions to gain human rights and equality for women and girls have freed and saved the lives of millions of women and girls—without weapons, without fists, without a drop of blood spilled.

Let’s bring the injustice of female inequality down to the personal level, where millions of women and girls here and throughout the world experience sexual violence, sex trafficking and prostitution; neglect of girls because of son preference; and preventable maternal mortality. Ponder this shocking finding: More lives were lost in the 20th century through male violence against women in all its forms than during 20th century wars and civil strife. Yet, while thousands of monuments in parks and plazas throughout the United States honor those who gave their lives for their country, only one – the first of its kind – is being planned for women who lost their lives giving birth to their country’s children.

World Association for Sustainable Development Video: “International Women’s Day 2024 and Most Influential Women 2024 Sustainability Awards ”

The scourge of men raping women and girls is now compounded in those US states that have denied or greatly diminished the reproductive right to abortion. It is estimated that there were 65,000 rape-related pregnancies between July 2022 and January 2024 in US states banning abortion since the US Supreme Court overturned the 50-year women’s right to make their own reproductive decisions.

Looking into women’s economic status, we find that women have higher rates of poverty than men across most races and ethnicities, with women of color having the highest. Women are hired at a lower level than male counterparts and paid less for the same work, and this wage discrepancy follows them throughout their work life. Domestic violence causes women to lose an average of 8 million days of paid work per year and is a strong factor in women’s homelessness.

Not only do more women than men struggle to cover everyday expenses due to the gender wage gap, which has remained stagnant for 20 years – at about 82% – but the gap compounds over a lifetime, a significant factor contributing to the disparity in poverty rates among women and men age 75 and older.

Women’s birth of and care for children are not compensated with paid parental leave in the United States, unlike all other comparable countries; thus, women who give birth are cheated of savings, pensions and Social Security. No surprise then that the greatest risk factor for being poor in old age is having been a mother.

On a personal note: My fairest employer was my brother Michael: when I delivered papers for him in 7th and 8th grades, he paid me the same rate as himself. Bless you, Mike

• Fairer than the US Environmental Protection Agency New England, which hired me a grade below a comparable male environmental engineer employed at the same time. (When I confronted the director about the inequity, he responded “Doesn’t your husband work?”)

• Fairer than my next employer, which hired me at a significantly lower salary than a comparable male colleague, forcing me to enter into (successful) litigation to win equal pay for equal work and retroactive compensation.

Finally, studies of women and men negotiating post-conflict agreements found that all-male groups take riskier, less empathic and more aggressive positions. They also break down more quickly than negotiations that include women. Interestingly, men are more satisfied with decisions made with women involved than by all-male groups.

So where are the women in negotiations for permanent ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, return of Israeli hostages and Palestinians in Israeli jails, and life-saving aid to Gaza? Where are the women in efforts to bring the war in Ukraine to an end? When will men dare to use the wisdom and skill of women to end their wars and create peace agreements that endure?

International Women’s Day is not only about the arithmetic of equality but also about its consequences – justice for women and girls and a better future for all in our country and the world.