Monday, August 31, 2009

The Women’s Crusade

Dear Friends:

This is a long piece but it very much worth taking the time to read. It includes powerful stories of truly heroic women, as well as thorough analysis and innovative ideas to encourage and inspire all of us to do more for women and girls around the world.

Abolition!

Lisa

"The global statistics on the abuse of girls are numbing. It appears that more girls and women are now missing from the planet, precisely because they are female, than men were killed on the battlefield in all the wars of the 20th century. The number of victims of this routine "gendercide" far exceeds the number of people who were slaughtered in all the genocides of the 20th century."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/magazine/23Women-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1#
The New York Times
August 23, 2009
The Women’s Crusade
By
NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF and SHERYL WuDUNN

IN THE 19TH CENTURY, the paramount moral challenge was slavery. In the 20th century, it was totalitarianism. In this century, it is the brutality inflicted on so many women and girls around the globe: sex trafficking, acid attacks, bride burnings and mass rape.

Yet if the injustices that women in poor countries suffer are of paramount importance, in an economic and geopolitical sense the opportunity they represent is even greater. "Women hold up half the sky," in the words of a Chinese saying, yet that’s mostly an aspiration: in a large slice of the world, girls are uneducated and women marginalized, and it’s not an accident that those same countries are disproportionately mired in poverty and riven by fundamentalism and chaos. There’s a growing recognition among everyone from the
World Bank to the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff to aid organizations like CARE that focusing on women and girls is the most effective way to fight global poverty and extremism. That’s why foreign aid is increasingly directed to women. The world is awakening to a powerful truth: Women and girls aren’t the problem; they’re the solution.

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