Walk to Equality: Ensuring safety and empowerment of women

-Gajender singh -Shubham Tiwari

Ensuring women’s safety?

• Baby girls were (still are) killed; older girl children were under nourished, widows were burnt alive, honour killed, women’s health and nutrition was neglected.

••self-preservation came first even in the deepest crisis

••They had to prevent themselves from going out in the wild to fight animals

•Women did labour in the fields (which they did not own) and at home (which they could be kicked out of) and brought forth a much needed new generation (who didn’t bear their names and took care of their spouse’s family and household (which made them paraya dhan in their birth families)

•In patriarchal societies marriage relocated women and took away their inheritance , freedoms and choices. Women could be forced to marry and stay married to anybody; sex and children outside marriage could get women killed.

•The reason why the work women do is not seen as work is because, not only does it come for free (in fact it comes with dowry) it generally does not empower the worker the way paid labour does. Quitting or seeking another job, until recently, was not seen as an option.

Walk to Equality: Ensuring safety and empowerment of women

Background

Women’s Empowerment

Of the 1.3 billion people who live in absolute poverty around the globe, 70 persent are women. For these women, poverty doesn’t just mean scarcity and want. It means rights denied, opportunities curtailed and voices silenced

Women earn only 10 percent of the world’s income.

• Where women work for money, they may be limited to a set of jobs deemed suitable for women – invariably low-pay, low-status positions.

Women own less than 1 percent of the world’s property

• Where laws or customs prevent women from owning land or other productive assets, from getting loans or credit, or from having the right to inheritance or to own their home.

In India, a CARE project working with adolescent girls noted that- “they are often seen only as temporary people who will cease to be – at least for the father – once they have disappeared inside a marriage.”

“Women are like livestock,” meaning many things. They can be bought and sold, as cattle can, and they are a productive asset, as cattle are. To this man, women were extremely important – his cattle certainly were – but they had the status of a commodity.

“If we’re going to talk about women’s empowerment, we have to talk about the problem of sexual violence. It’s great if the head of the community development committee is a woman. But if she’s going home and getting raped every night by her brother-inlaw, is she empowered? No.” Kassie McIlvaine, CARE’s Director in Burundi

Violence against women and girls is both a global and local societal ill—global because its perpetrators and victims are in every corner of the world, and local because its forms differ from one place to the next depending on specific cultural, political and socio-economic circumstances

The Many Forms of Gender-Based Violence

•Gender-based violence, which includes sexual, physical or psychological violence and harmful practices based on gender, is one of the most common human rights abuses in the world. It is also one of the least discussed and confronted. • From sexual harassment on Japan’s public transport system to spousal battery in Russia, from trafficking for sexual slavery in Thailand’s brothels to prostitution on the streets of the United States, from female genital mutilation in Ethiopia to breast ironing in Cameroon, from female infanticide in India to forced sterilization of women in China, from child marriage in Bangladesh to murders in the name of honor in Jordan, from rape to “correct and cure” South Africa’s lesbians to rape as a weapon of Serbian ethnic-cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina—this list of human rights violations endured by the world’s women and girls is nowhere near exhaustive. • In a relationship (marriage), birthing and nursing a child (which were many as our species needed to grow to outnumber other species and ensure prosperity) without much medical advances meant most women had to remain indoors, which translated to taking care of indoor work.

India is home to thousands of women’s savings groups created with the help of numerous organizations

Recently it found concluded research into our own and a random control group of other women’s self-help groups in Orissa State. Evidence shows that women who participate in our “Microfinance-Plus” projects (the “Plus” includes training in human rights, health and governance topics, similar to the training that MMD members enjoy in Niger) experienced higher levels of empowerment than women in a random control group. Women who received credit and who sustained social, political and business-development training for more than three years displayed greater independence, increased household decision-making, more control of resources, and more equality within the home. Further, evidence revealed that women in “Microfinance-Plus” projects spent 125 percent more money on the education of their children and 43 percent more on health care than women in the control group.

Women are not at all SAFE in India... The regular rapes and assaults on women, that are occurring, is the proof. Men treat women as a medium just for enjoyment which according to every women and girl is wrong. The culprits should be soaked in petrol and lit fire and made to return over on to the area where they used to live, they should be burnt to death.

Dead Indian women Can you approximately say how many rape cases happen each minute? What I mean by dead Indian women is that safety for women in India is dead. India is the 4th dangerous place for women and in India all the rape cases lack justice. So its clear that there is no safety for women in India. Its dead.

Where are women safe? The fight to for equality has been on the agenda for infinite nations. The condition of women in workplaces, in the domestic realm and in the community has improved. However we hear of incidences across the world causing uproar and rage due to disrespect and misogyny. India still experiences the brutal blueprint of female foeticide and dowry. It will take much more to make India and the world a safer place.