A colleague sent me this story. Sad to say, since I read the international news and am connected with some people in developing countries, It was not new to me. Actually if you pay attention to www.ncwit.org, we have a way to go in the US.
First , the data from the US
HANDS ON tECHNOLOGY
How aware are we of the socio cultural kinds of things we support in other cultures, or not? My mother was Native American , my father Black, which makes me Black in America or did before Obama.
In America we talk about opportunities for women and ways to point them to opportunities.
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While working around the world, I found that being a single , American female was not necessarily a good
talking point. I was often asked, ” Do you have disease?” and questiones about why I was not married at the time.
I was teaching STEM initiatives in Jordan when the men entering said. ” Where is the teacher, this is a woman?!!”
Meanwhile if we add minority status to the mix. we get this
data.
“Money won’t create success, the freedom to make it will,” explained the South African freedom fighter Nelson Mandela. Success is a difficult thing to measure. How do you determine success when your neighborhood is flooded or teachers at your child’s school are being laid off? Is the freedom to succeed something that most Americans feel in their daily lives?
Although Nelson Mandela highlights how the powers of money are limited, he also suggests that people struggle to be successful when they do not have access to work and economic opportunity. In the United States, the disparity of wealth among the people is a grim reality. It is particularly glaring when you look at the median income for people grouped by race and sex.
Women of every race made less than men. Those who usually worked full time had median earnings of $683 per week, or 82.4 percent of the $829 median for men. The female-to-male earnings ratio varied by race and ethnicity. White women earned 81.7 percent of their male counterparts, compared with black (95.0 percent), Asian (80.4 percent), and Hispanic women (90.4 percent). Although the gap between black men and women’s salaries is not as gaping as within other workers of other races, this figure may say more about the staggering degree of discrimination against black men than lack of sexism against black women.
The Department of Commerce gives us this information on women in America.
International Status of Women
But in my travels, I found women to be set aside in technology, or at least minor players in the technology world. I had been appointed by the President and worked internatinally, but who knew that women were looked at askance in other cultures.
“[Opium] is the only means of survival for thousands of women-headed households.”
I will talk about Afghanistan because most of the stories I am getting are from there.I have worked in Africa with the boy soldiers and the girls who were forced to be with them and the soldiers.They told us about the boys, but one had to pry to find out about the girls.OPIUM BRIDES?
In the country’s poppy-growing provinces, farmers are being forced to sell their daughters to pay loans.
Khalida’s father says she’s 9—or maybe 10. As much as Sayed Shah loves his 10 children, the functionally illiterate Afghan farmer can’t keep track of all their birth dates. Khalida huddles at his side, trying to hide beneath her chador and headscarf. They both know the family can’t keep her much longer. Khalida’s father has spent much of his life raising opium, as men like him have been doing for decades in the stony hillsides of eastern Afghanistan and on the dusty southern plains. It’s the only reliable cash crop most of those farmers ever had. Even so, Shah and his family barely got by: traffickers may prosper, but poor farmers like him only subsist. Now he’s losing far more than money. “I never imagined I’d have to pay for growing opium by giving up my daughter,” says Shah.
The family’s heartbreak began when Shah borrowed $2,000 from a local trafficker, promising to repay the loan with 24 kilos of opium at harvest time. Late last spring, just before harvest, a government crop-eradication team appeared at the family’s little plot of land in Laghman province and destroyed Shah’s entire two and a half acres of poppies. Unable to meet his debt, Shah fled with his family to Jalalabad, the capital of neighboring Nangarhar province. The trafficker found them anyway and demanded his opium. So Shah took his case before a tribal council in Laghman and begged for leniency. Instead, the elders unanimously ruled that Shah would have to reimburse the trafficker by giving Khalida to him in marriage. Now the family can only wait for the 45-year-old drugrunner to come back for his prize. Khalida wanted to be a teacher someday, but that has become impossible. “It’s my fate,” the child says.
Afghans disparagingly call them “loan brides”—daughters given in marriage by fathers who have no other way out of debt. The practice began with the dowry a bridegroom’s family traditionally pays to the bride’s father in tribal Pashtun society. These days the amount ranges from $3,000 or so in poorer places like Laghman and Nangarhar to $8,000 or more in Helmand, Afghanistan’s No. 1 opium-growing province. For a desperate farmer, that bride price can be salvation—but at a cruel cost. Among the Pashtun, debt marriage puts a lasting stain on the honor of the bride and her family. It brings shame on the country, too. President Hamid Karzai recently told the nation: “I call on the people [not to] give their daughters for money; they shouldn’t give them to old men, and they shouldn’t give them in forced marriages.”
December 20, 2011, 12:08 pm ET
In Opium Brides, airing Tuesday, January 3, 2012, at 10 p.m. ET on PBS (check local listings), award-winning Afghan journalist Najibullah Quraishi takes viewers deep into the remote Afghan countryside to reveal the deadly bargain local farm families have been forced to make with drug smugglers in order to survive.
“Other News” is a personal initiative seeking to provide information that should be in the media but is not, because of commercial criteria. It welcomes contributions from everybody. Work areas include information on global issues, north-south relations, governance of globalization. Roberto Savio //Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited, article sent for information purposes.//
AFGHANISTAN: Husband, 60, Wife, 8
By Rebecca Murray
A colleague sent me this story. Sad to say, since I read the international news and am connected with some people in developing countries, It was not new to me.
KABUL, Dec 29, 2011 (IPS) – Activists voice concern that Afghan women’s rights continue to be marginalised, and nowhere is gender inequality more starkly illustrated than in the country’s flawed justice system.
Yasmin’s case is one. Although the legal age for female marriage is 16 years, she was only eight when her family, in a remote area of Nangarhar province, arranged her marriage to a 60-year old man. After four unhappy years, Yasmin fled with a man she was in love with from her village.
When the couple was arrested for running away and marrying again, she was pregnant. Having her baby in prison, Yasmin has since been released. She has moved to a Kabul shelter, fearful that her family and first husband, now 70, will kill her to protect their honour.
“The first step we are planning for her is to get a divorce – she is 18 and has that right,” says Huma Safi, programme manager for Women for Afghan Women, an organisation that provides female shelters, legal and family counseling. “The second step is to arrange a proper marriage with the second husband who she loves. This marriage will decrease her husband’s sentence also. Then she will go and live with him.”
When the second Bonn Conference on Afghanistan convened on Dec. 5, Afghan women fought for a voice at the table, exactly one decade after the international community initially gathered in the German city to plan Afghanistan’s institutional road map with an emphasis on civil rights.
The priorities of Bonn II, within the context of a 2014 deadline for the withdrawal of international coalition forces, is the security transition, peace talks with the Taliban and future regional relationships.
The World Bank has warned of Afghanistan’s dependency on international aid – more than 90 percent of its 17.1 billion dollar national budget – and Bonn II is a marker for cuts in donor cash. Afghan women advocates worry their projects will be some of those hard hit.
Selay Gaffar from the Afghan Women’s Network (AWN), a national coalition of women’s organisations, had just three minutes at the conference to urge continued support of women’s rights. Bonn II’s concluding statement briefly linked gender equality to the Afghan constitution in governance and with peace negotiations.
Female activist have made an impact raising awareness of gender rights, and improving access to education and healthcare, mostly in urban areas. Women’s shelters have also been established, including for those released from prisons and now stigmatised from returning home, but the women in them say they don’t feel safe or have freedom of movement.
Despite these advances, a Thompson-Reuters poll released in June 2011 ranked Afghanistan as the world’s most dangerous country for women due to violence, poverty and lack of healthcare.
“From 2001 to about 2003 there was a lot of attention on women’s rights, and then it decreased,” says Huma Safi. “Our main concern is that we don’t want to go back to the situation we had 15 years ago. Not only during the Taliban, but also before the Taliban.
“During the Mujahedeen’s civil war a lot of women were raped,” she explains. “People then were so tired from war and we were forgotten by the international community.”
On the eve of Bonn II, President Hamid Karzai pardoned Gulnaz, a 21-year-old rape victim sentenced by an Afghan court for adultery, who bore a child in prison from the rape.
But the presidential pardon in the high-profile case of was an anomaly; the majority of the roughly 700 women in Afghanistan’s variously overcrowded and squalid prisons are convicted for crimes of adultery or “zina” (sex outside marriage), usually their punishment for running away from forced marriage or chronic abuse. Many have their children jailed with them.
“There are two main types of cases, with plenty of variation, you hear over and over again,” explains Heather Barr, a researcher with Human Rights Watch. “One is usually young girls about to be forced into a marriage against their will who run away to avoid it. Sometimes on their own, or sometimes with a man who helps them, but not who they are romantically involved with.
“Another category are women who have married someone almost always against their will, and there is abuse at home,” she says. “Usually physical abuse, sometimes just cruelty, and they run away. These often turn into zina cases because there might be a man accompanying them.”
Barr says that while all the women she interviewed had defence attorneys, the quality of representation appeared poor, and the trials lack investigation and proof. “Sometimes a man manages to bribe his way out, but the woman does not,” she adds.
“Zina is in the penal code, but running away is not. When I talked with judges or lawyers about this, they say that by running away the woman are at risk for zina.”
A large part of the population still relies on traditional mechanisms within communities to resolve disputes outside of the formal court system, Human Rights Watch says.
In 2009 President Karzai signed the Shia Family Law, which included provisions for 14-year-old girls to marry, and for married men to forcibly have sex with their wives. After an outcry by civil society and the international community, the Shia legislation has been amended.
The same year, the Afghan government enacted the Elimination of Violence Against Women (EVAW) law which criminalised acts like early or forced marriage and rape.
A United Nations analysis of its implementation last month says, “Judicial officials in many parts of the country have begun to use the law – but its use represents a very small percentage of how the government addresses cases of violence against women.”
Female victims like Zuhra continue to get blamed. Living in Kabul, she was 12 years old when she was married to an older man who already had three wives. He forced her into a daily living of prostitution until their house was raided. After her arrest and two-year prison sentence, she is now 17 and living in a shelter.
“We got her a divorce, but now she wants to marry again. We are trying to make her understand she has time, there is no rush,” says Huma Safi. “I cannot blame her when you are out of prison, the only option they are thinking is if you have a husband you are protected.”
*Names of women have been changed to protect their identities. (END)
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