Every few minutes a woman (including girl children) is murdered by her partner or a family member in some corner of the world.
The conflicts on our planet are unceasing. Every day we see how altercations over political, racial, religious or other issues occur without control. People are crammed into big cities, perhaps thinking that overcrowding, the mass, will largely protect them from the horrors of such conflicts. Like cattle that huddle around themselves in order to hide from the shepherd or the dog that beats them. But mass society is not exactly the protective mother we all need.
We have reached the first quarter of the 21st century and, a few years ago, nobody predicted the palpable regression of human rights for women and girls. Nobody can doubt the implementation of measures all over the world that presaged the regression of male misogyny. However, on a day-to-day basis we can see that this has not really been the case; there is an increasing amount of overwhelming data showing the number of feminicides around the world, causing hopes to be diluted among the tangle of news stories that are produced worldwide.
In 1995 the acclaimed Beijing Treaty was signed, and today, thirty years later, a study has been carried out to verify that what was agreed has indeed contributed to progress in the world, in terms of the scourges of machismo and the advancement of women.
Among the clearly objectifiable results, it has been possible to provide women with a better quality of life. For example, maternal mortality has been reduced by 33%. Women have also achieved greater political representation in parliaments, even reaching a certain degree of parity in some countries. However, this has not been possible in most totalitarian societies where religious or tribal laws prevail.
There is one positive fact and that is that there have been around 1,531 accepted legal reforms in the world, between countries and official organisations. There have been 189 countries that have tried to agree on laudable objectives regarding this unnatural dysfunctionality and that is that women are still inferior to men in many aspects of all kinds. However, and despite the efforts made, we are far from achieving this objective.
Unfortunately, there is still a long way to go. Attention has now turned to the new Beijing+30 Platform for Action, which will be linked to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Although if we bear in mind that this agenda is being widely criticised by some and is unacceptable to others, it is very likely that in a few years’ time we will still be fighting in a concrete way for women’s equality in more advanced societies and for the achievement of the most basic human rights in more primitive societies that cling to their sexist social, religious or political beliefs in order to continue subjugating women from the moment they are born.
All in all, we can see that considerable efforts are still needed to achieve that much-needed gender equality and thus bring us, as a society, closer to fulfilling the desired objectives. If we analyse the measures adopted, we can see that, in general terms, little is being done for abused women, those who are murdered at the end of a life cycle of continuous suffering, without going into, as has been emphasised in this article, the vital field of subjugated women in totalitarian societies. More than 1,500 measures to achieve parity only seem to be having an impact in the field of gynaecology, but little else.
One of the most controversial issues, and one in which no great progress has been made, is the eradication of violence, V0 (zero violence) in the environment of women and girls in all countries of the world. It is true that many regulations have been established to at least conceal the figures that every year cause more and more outrage around the world, as far as the protection of these girls is concerned. But it is obvious that something is going wrong. The human rights of girls are being diluted in the face of radical societies that consent to considering them adult women with few years to live; they are married off to be subjected to the whims of men who could be their fathers or grandfathers, sold as sex slaves in much of the world, abandoned on the streets of big cities to be preyed upon by human traffickers, or simply ignored and wrapped in dark veils to be little less than invisible in radically religious societies. As for women, just by looking at the figures that different societies show us on a daily basis, we find truly terrible situations of helplessness. Are we becoming immune to this data? Do we ignore it? As members of a modern and, so to speak, civilised society, am I, are you, doing anything to eradicate this culture of subjugation?
It is worth remembering the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), a body dependent on the United Nations General Assembly, which, created in 1979, is considered the Magna Carta of human rights for women all over the world, its resolutions being legally binding in all the countries that signed it. However, in general, its text is not usually displayed in public organisations, schools or workplaces, in an attempt to gradually raise awareness of it in modern society.
Then there are, of course, all the countries that have not signed, nor will they do so in the immediate future, any kind of agreement on this issue, including Iran, Yemen, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia or Qatar. Some have opted for war and the atrocious torture and murder of women and girls, while others have chosen to clean up their image with powerful economic strategies that silence critics in the world’s ‘civilised’ countries. Money is a powerful weapon, as is the case with Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
But if there is one country that now stands out as a champion of the greatest social atrocities against women and girls, it is undoubtedly Afghanistan, which isolates and subjects the female gender to constant torture, relegating them to a legal status almost akin to that of beasts.
And perhaps, in a little-discussed fact, perhaps shrouded by the almost permanent war between Jews and Palestinians (terrorists), more than thirty women are cruelly murdered every year in Palestinian territory without any authority being interested in knowing where it comes from or who commits such internal violence. Apart from the social subjugation of women by men in this failed state.
Antonio Guterres, Secretary General of the UN, said in one of his speeches: ‘When women and girls succeed, we all succeed’. This leads us to think that the lack of resolution of this social conflict irrevocably leads us to a certain dehumanisation of the society in which we live. There is no need to comment and it is even despicable that articles like this one have to continue to be written. Neither the millions invested nor the laws implemented in the last 25 years seem to have had any effect.
Originally published at LaDamadeElche.com
