Dear Editor,

WHILE women continue to attain positions of leadership, they do so at a pace far below the tipping point at which such achievements become transformational for women in general. Women’s rights to bodily and sexual integrity are being steadily eroded around the world – physically, legally, politically and militarily.

According to the latest UNAIDS Report, in 2015 in sub-Saharan Africa, 7,500 girls and young women aged 15 to 24 were infected with HIV every week.  More than 90 per cent of the adolescents infected are girls. Islamic extremist factions have sexually enslaved thousands of female Yazidi in Iraq and Syria, and kidnapped hundreds of schoolgirls in Nigeria.

Medical abortion is treated as homicide in El Salvador. Moreover, an upsurge of extreme right-wing governments in Europe, and particularly in the United States, is undermining sexual and reproductive rights previously considered secure.

Here in Guyana, brutality and violent deaths of females at the hands of males challenge any complacency about male domination. Underlying domination is the enduring conviction that subjugation of women to men is the natural order of things.

This is known as patriarchy. By extension, too many males continue to feel entitled to comment on and harass any female they casually encounter in mini-buses or in the street or on rural trails.

More sinister forms of violence involve controlling women’s whereabouts, phone-calls and friends which often end in fatalities. The levels of violence against women and girls should be a wake-up call to recognise how quickly protection of women’s rights and freedoms can be reversed.

It has to be recognised that the resilience of macho attitudes is rooted in religious traditions. Indeed, religious beliefs are the cross-cutting claim by wrongdoers to justify many of the physical and legal forms of violence against women referred to above.

Violence against women is pervasive in Guyana, driven by economic pressures; by a broadcast media complacently careless of its own role, titillating and sexualising the society; and by a Government which – along with most governments – has embraced the misguided notion of ‘gender mainstreaming’ instead of women’s rights.
‘Main-streaming gender’ pre-supposes the primary battles regarding women’s physical and reproductive integrity are things of the past.  While this was thought to be the case in developed societies, it was never achieved in most parts of the world.  However, current developments are threatening those gains around the world.

Rather than mobilising substantial resources at a global level in the transformational campaign required to secure women’s rights – something akin, for example, to the original response to the HIV epidemic  – responses to violence against women have been reduced to anonymous bureaucratic  ‘mainstreaming’ with time-lines that reflect no sense of urgency, as illustrated by the Sustainable Development Goals.

At the domestic level, a sustained campaign of this nature must be mounted to counter the values and the practices that sow and sustain patriarchal attitudes.

Such a campaign should have a special focus on the media and all major faith organisations.

Regards,
Guyana Human Rights Association