The first thing to note is that western women do not suffer any harm
through war â€" they are at the delivering, not the receiving, end of
the missile.
A UNIFEM report has it that " The economic cost of violence against
women is considerable â€" a 2003 report by the US Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that the costs of intimate
partner violence in the United States alone ýexceed US$5.8 billion
per year: US$4.1 billion are for direct medical and health care
services, while productivity losses account for nearly US$1.8
billion."
In peaceful Geneva, Switzerland, a randomly selected study of nearly
1,200 ninth-grade students revealed that 20 per cent of girls had
experienced at least one incident of physical sexual abuse
(http://www.unifem.org/gender_issues/violence_against_women/facts_fig
ures.php).
According to The Care Center (www.teencarecenter.org ):
• Of rape victims who reported the offense to law enforcement, about
40% were
under the age of 18, and 15% were younger than 12.ý
• Of 1,000 representative female students at a large urban
university, over half
had experienced some form of unwanted sex. Twelve percent of these
acts
were perpetrated by casual dates and 43% by steady dating partners.
• Female adolescents are frequent victims of sexual assault and
rape. The
incidence of rape in the United States peaks among young women 16 to
19
years of age. The reported incidence of rape and sexual assault
reflects a
fraction of the actual frequency of this crime. The National Victim
Center
estimates that almost 700,000 women are raped each year, and that
61% of the
victims are under the age of 18.
• Female adolescents are at high risk for becoming victims of
acquaintance rape
or “date rape.†Studies have shown that the highest incidence of
acquaintance
rape occurred in grade 12 and during the freshman year of college.
Of the
25% of college women surveyed who reported having had unwanted sexual
intercourse, 84% knew their assailant, 57% of the episodes occurred
on dates,
and 41% of the women stated that they were virgins at the time of
the assault.
Again, this is probably an underestimation of the true incidence of
date rape
Alcohol a factor:
• It is estimated that approximately one-half of assault cases
involve alcohol
consumption by the perpetrator, victim, or both. Moreover, while
alcohol
consumption and sexual assault frequently co-occur, this phenomenon
does
not prove that alcohol use causes sexual assault. Rather, alcohol
contributes to
sexual assault through multiple pathways, often exacerbating
existing risk
factors. For example, the desire to commit sexual violence may
actually cause
alcohol consumption in that a male perpetrator drinks alcohol before
committing a sexual assault in order to justify his behavior.
Whereas, among
college-aged males, fraternities encourage both heavy drinking and
the sexual
exploitation of women.
Date rape drugs:
• Date rape drugs or drug-facilitated sexual assault causes sedation
and amnesia
to the extent that a potential victim cannot resist or may not be
aware of the
assault. In fact, about 25% of the women who contacted the Canadian
Sexual
Assault Center reported that drugs were a factor in a rape. The most
commonly reported drugs in addition to alcohol to facilitate sexual
assault are
flunitrazepam and gamma hydroxybutyric acid (GHB), which is now
touted as
a new recreational ‘club drug’.
Long term effects:
• Victims of marital or date rape are 11 times more likely to be
clinically ýdepressed, and 6 times more likely to experience social
phobia than are non-victims. Psychological problems are still
evident in cases as long as 15 years after the assault.
That's not a pretty picture for any society, especially one that
claims to be the universal conscience, with the ability to tell
right from wrong. Why should a society that respects women as
individuals, unlike (remember) Muslim society, why should such a
society present such awful statistics?
I will let Andrea Dworkin speak on the subject of western man's
perception of western woman.
"The skin of white women has a meaning in pornography. In a white-
supremacist society, ýthe skin of white women is supposed to
indicate privilege. Being white is as good as it gets. What, then,
does it mean that pornography is filled with white women? It means
that when one takes a woman who is at the zenith of the hierarchy in
racial terms and one asks her, What do you want?, she, who
supposedly has some freedom and some choices, says, I want to be
used. She says, use me, hurt me, exploit me, that is what I want.
The society tells us that she is a standard, a standard of beauty, a
standard of womanhood and femininity. But, in fact, she is a
standard of compliance. She is a standard of submission. She is a
standard for oppression, its emblem; she models oppression, she
incarnates it; which is to say that she does what she needs to do in
order to stay alive, the configuration of her conformity
predetermined by the men who like to ejaculate on her white skin.
She is for sale. And so what is her white skin worth? It makes her
price a little higher.
(http://www.voxygen.net/cpa/speeches/dworkintxt.htm)"
What Andrea Dworkin had to say about women being objectified in
western society cannot be easily denied: and one does not have to go
as far as pornography to see it (though we must keep in mind the
fact that pornography in the US alone constitutes a $10 billion
industry). Advertisements routinely use women; there are women's
pageants still; the diversity of lingerie that western, consumer
society has dreamt up â€" and which is almost totally missing in a
place like Bangladesh â€" can leave little room for doubt that women
are meant to be gazed on â€" consumed - by men....
In conclusion, what are we to say about the positive stereotype of
the western woman against the negative stereotype of her easter
sister?
They are both completely wrong.
IFTEKHAR SAYEED
http://www.geocities.com/if6065/farvardin
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