Sex and the shantytown
If you’re a woman – don’t live in Sierra Leone if you can help it.
One in 8 women dies during pregnancy or childbirth, and women have an abysmal life expectancy of just 43 years, one of the lowest in the world. Girls can expect to receive only six years of schooling. On top of it all, the horrors of Sierra Leone’s decade-long civil war, in which perhaps a third of the country’s women and girls suffered sexual violence, haunt women today. Widows struggle to get by, survivors of wartime rape face stigma and discrimination, and men continue to assault women with impunity.
One in 8! One in 8!! That’s grotesque. But Papua New Guinea is not great either.
Girls in Papua New Guinea can expect to receive only five years of schooling. What’s worse, accusing women of sorcery is often used as a form of social “payback.” If someone unexpectedly becomes ill or dies, the grievance is often taken out on an alleged “sorcerer”—almost always a woman—who is beaten, raped, or even killed in retaliation.
Haiti isn’t a female nirvana.
Nearly half the young women and girls in the capital’s Cite Soleil shantytown have been raped or sexually assaulted…[T]he problem isn’t taken seriously because many Haitians, including members of the police and judicial system, consider nonconsensual sex as rape only if the victim was a virgin….[I]f a husband finds his wife engaging in adultery in his home, the criminal code excuses him if he kills her…
And as for Yemen, why, it sounds very much like Saudi Arabia –
Early marriage is commonplace in Yemen, with 48 percent of girls married by the time they are 18 and some brides as young as 12….One in 39 women die during pregnancy or childbirth, and 1 in 10 children doesn’t make it to a fifth birthday. Yemeni women live particularly restricted lives; for example, getting a passport and traveling abroad requires a husband’s or father’s permission.
If you’re a woman…be very careful about where you settle down.
Those girls could leave if they really wanted to. Obviously it’s their CHOICE to live like this. It’s called the Law of Attraction. Or maybe it’s their KARMA, maybe they chose to live like this before they were born. Who are you to say they didn’t? At any rate, you need to forget about the human aspect of all this and just realise that these are spiritual beings having a human experience, not the other way round, so there’s no point worrying about the material plane and just focus on some beautiful waterfalls, or a pretty sunset, or the milky way, or maybe even a rainbow. Because your negative vibes are starting to bring down the vibration of the entire planet, don’t you understand that by even writing about this stuff your just amplifying the anger? Global enlightenment and transformation can’t happen until people like you just take a deep breath and start handing out hugs and smiles instead of negativity. Peace sista I’m sending you lots of love and light.
Sorry that last post was sarcastic and by me. Guess I’m a bit bored today. But honestly I am kind of fascinated in a car-crash way by the people I’ve met who do actually think like that.
Seriously, re the terrible living conditions some women are born into, what can be done about it by average first world people like me?
Rose, you´re doing it.
In Moldova, “some government officials and police officers have even been complicit in trafficking.”
Some British police ignore the pleas of its citizens when in fear of their lives.
The police in Muslim countries are by their governments trained to keep womendown.
The police allegedly take bribes from Scientologists.
In Ireland in the past when the government was by some concerned people warned about abuse of children in Industrial Schools – it turned its back and shoved all it heard under the carpet.
Not so very long ago the religious tried to do the same vis à vis Irish, European and international clerical child sexual abuse.
One-half of the world is still so busy sweeping up the dirt in its own backyard that it does not care how the other half is treating its own people.
In fact, some celebrity superstars, business people, and pseudo do-gooders cash in on the suffering of these poor unfortunates – by making for themselves – names.
They remind me of the Pharisees in the temples – and the ones who constantly sit in the front pews of their respective churches crying out “Look at me – Lord. Look, what I do for the poor of the world”. They thump their cra’s – while saying out loud “what wonderful, caring people we are, O Lord.
They want everyone to know the work they do for charities. Nevertheless, you can be sure if they we physically confronted by the same people on their doorsteps they would not give them the time of day.
Charity begins at home.
Moreover, if people genuinely want to be charitable to the poor of the world they should start with opening up their minds and hearts to those around them.
Poverty wears many masks.
Education is one of the secrets of getting around the poverty issues of these third world countries.
Step outside of your cocoon shelters and look around your areas first – get a taste of the ugliness of poverty and if you can withstand it for one whole day.
Then only then can you begin to empathise with the rest of the world. You know a lot of so called aid workers who went out to the third world have purportedly been sexually abusing the very people who were so desperately in need of their help. Their motives left much to be desired. There should have been vetting procedures in place.
These kind of aid workers in my estimation are akin to pseudonomous website users who prey on bebo -like vulnerable young people and women.
Job, if I’m already doing what I can do, why do I feel so impotent and frustrated?
Here here Marie.T. Rose I get that feeling as well(probably why I have extreme high blood presure)and the conclusion I have come to is that you can do nothing more than make yourself aware of the plight of these people because even if it makes you feel impotent that is better than indifference?
First rate wind up by the way Rose.
Rose – I have no idea, can´t help but by repeating it´s not you that should feel bad about it. Sacrifice, feeling bad, & all that are concepts meant to keep you down. Better to entertain, & unload as you did.
JoB,
What? Concepts meant to keep you down? Is that meant to be satirical?
If it gets you down, DO something about it. Take some action – and I don’t mean just post on sites. And I don’t mean some conscience-salving petition writing. Venting is a useful frustration management tool, for sure. But doing what you can is better
DFG, I don’t think that was what JoB meant. Guilt, as in “a feeling of-“, is a very insidious and pernicious concept.
It’s one the worse ideas we inherited from the Greeks even if they, at least, had the decency not to bungle it with “redemption”. We should get rid of it altogether.
Understand what you’re getting at Arnaud, but guilt goes beyond the Greek influence. Are you saying that without the greek cultural inheritance, we would not suffer from guilt? Hmmm.
In this case, perhaps guilt is the wrong word. Helplessness and frustration? Can you feel guilty about that which you do not have much power to change? I don’t feel guilty about the examples provided by OB, I feel a sense of injustice and frankly, pissed-off-ed-ness (technical term, that) and therefore have tried to do what I capable of – considering my other obligations, need and desires – to do what I can about them.
To be honest, DFG, I didn’t really think that much about it when I included the Greeks in that sentence.
Helplessness and frustration, yes maybe, but some people do feel guilty about it, and that is a new idea. Guilt was reserved for something you did, a transgression either moral or legal.
(On the other hand, how much of all this can be put at the door of centuries of western influence, failed colonialism, crap development policies and, in the case of Haiti at least, the horrible mess left behind by slavery? Perhaps that guilt is not totally irrational after all.)
And the Greeks kind of put guilt on a pedestal. Oedipus putting out his eyes, Ajax falling on his spear, the Erinyes… It certainly made a fertile ground for the concept of original sin.
Beware of liberals bearing guilt!