Introduction Violence against women and girls is internationally prevalent. Regardless of class, age, or race, women everywhere are subject to physical, sexual, psychological, and economic aggression (United Nations, 2015; 1). According to the World Health organization, 1 in 3 women will experience physical and/or sexual violence by a partner a non-partner. Moreover, studies conducted by the World Health Organization suggest that exposure to violent behavior can have detrimental impacts that can affect the physical, mental, and emotional health of a woman or girl; some instances of extreme violence also lead to death. Due to the epidemic of gender-based homicides, the term ‘femicide’ became apparent. The term ‘femicide’ was coined by a woman named Carol Orlock, but was later defined in 2001 by an expert on violence against women and girls, Diana E. H. Russell. Femicide, as Diana defines it, is "the killing of females by males because they are female”. Presented by the World Health Organization, the main types and prevalence of femicide are intimate femicide, murders in the name of ‘honor’, dowry-related femicide, and non-intimate femicide (Garcia-Moreno, Guedes and Knerr, 2012; 1-2). Indeed, the forms of femicide existing vary among all cultures internationally, however, in this paper; I will primarily focus on non-intimate femicide in the region of Ciudad Juarez. Before delving into the complexities surrounding non-intimate femicide in Juarez, I will first examine the
When my roommate was in elementary school, the boys in her grade would not let her play sports with her. The reason they gave her was that she was a girl, and sports were not for girls. She was told that she was not strong enough to play, and that sports were a boy thing. They then told her to go play house or kiss tag. When they said that, she proceeded to beat the boys up, making them look like the ones who weren’t strong. While violence is not the way to prove someone wrong, this story has a point. Taylor wanted to play basketball, but she was told she couldn’t because she was a girl. This might seem like innocent children making assumptions, but this is where it begins. These children will grow into adults that watch movies like Pixel, where the woman who is objectified is literally turned into an object, watch television shows like Two and a Half Men, which glorifies the manipulation and sexual conquest of women, and read books like Lolita and take it seriously. This idea, while developed in other places as well, is created through the media.
For centuries domestic violence has been perceived as a private matter private of which the government has not been concerned about nor was it considered the government’s business to intervene on behalf of a battered spouse. The unlawful nature of this failure for state or federal government intervention against this crime contributed to the systematic abuse of women in the family. The traditions, customs, and common law found in both British and American societies continued right up until the last decade of the 20th century and left the battered wives and very frequently, her children, at the mercy of the husband. It wasn’t until the 1990’s when the government began to do something to protect mothers, wives, and lovers from intimate
Domestic violence against women is prevalent in almost all the societies in the world. It is an issue which was not even recognised as a crime 40 years ago and is still not recognized as a crime by many societies. Women suffer from violence, including physical, sexual, emotional, and psychological violence by strangers and their partners all over the world (Kaya, 2010). Even though it is a worldwide occurrence, there are some women who face more intense and frequent violence depending on their culture, country, religion,
Feminism has not changed today, but its focus has changed. Many women today have good education and employment opportunities just like men, as the early feminist fought for them. Now, after getting all these, men are now discriminating them and at times abusing them in order to undermine their hard work and potentiality. Men are doing all they can to undermine the success women have been able to acquired, however, today’s feminism is struggling to protect women and girls from domestic violence, sexual harassment, and rape as well as discrimination.
If government officials are truly interested in assisting Indigenous communities in dealing with the violence in their communities, they should demonstrate this commitment by developing a national strategy to curb violence against Indigenous women. Special attention should be paid to the way race, gender, and power intersects in the violence faced by Indigenous women. Furthermore, as specifically mentioned by Professor Adam Jones of UBC Okanagan, the structural violence of their continuing poverty, discrimination and dispossession from ancestral territories, as well as the echoing trauma of the residential-school genocide needs to be assessed (Jones). Significantly, to address violence against Indigenous women successfully,
Did you know that every 9 seconds a women is being beaten or assaulted? It is known that around the world, at least one and every three women has been beaten into having sex or some rudely thing in her entire lifetime. There are many cases where the abuser is a family member. Domestic violence is that the willful intimidation, physical assault, battery, sex crime, and different abusive behavior perpetrated by an intimate partner against another. It is a virulent disease touching people in each community, notwithstanding age, economic standing, race, religion, status or academic background. Violence against girls is usually amid showing emotion abusive and dominant behavior, and so is a component of a scientific pattern of dominance and
Violence against women has existed for centuries and women experience violence in many setting; however, domestic violence is the most prevalent. Abela and Walker (2014) explain that the women’s right movement took place because women were maltreated and oppressed (78). They state that the victimization of women was the reason why the second wave of the feminist movement arose. They also explain that during this time, laws in the Untied States allow men to hit their wives (Abela & Walker 79). Women from different cultures and different economic status have been victims of domestic violence. In this paper, I will focus on domestic violence against women from different cultures. I will present information about the history of domestic violence
I am a 38-year-old white American female. Some would argue that there is no better time to a woman in America – we have far more rights and privileges than either our colonial ancestors or women in many third world nations. Yet, even in my lifetime women have achieved milestones like the Violence Against Women Act, originally passed in 1994 but reauthorized and updated in 2013. Females in this country fight battles on many fronts that males, as a group, do not have to deal with on the same level. Women are sexually harassed, assaulted and raped far more than men. I myself have dealt with all three scenarios so far in my 38 years. Sexual harassment, sexual battery, and rape are all social problems that millions of American women face daily.
These trends, however, do not account for the whole country because they differ from place to place. The case of Ciudad Juarez is particularly extreme and, sometimes, shocking. Ciudad Juarez is a city of 1.3 million people across from El Paso, Texas. Although Ciudad Juarez is incredibly rich in nature and culture, in the last couple of years, it has not been known because of these virtues; instead, it has been all over the news due to its homicide rates, which have had peak rates greater than many war zones. One particular aspect that characterizes the homicides of this city is the high level of “feminicidios” (femicides or feminicides in English) that have taken place in the last two decades. In fact, more than 300 women have been murdered
Giselle Portenier’s “Guatemala: Killer’s Paradise” is a documentary released in 2007 that focuses on the increasingly rising murder rate of women in Guatemala that largely go unsolved. This documentary illustrates the persistent gender expectations and perpetuate gendered violence since the Guatemalan Civil War as well as the lack of proper response from government institutions. Gender expectations and prejudices that arose out of the Guatemalan Civil War have developed a machoist, misogynistic society that is strife with physical and sexual violence toward women through which this societal violence has been entrenched through state inaction.
This documentary has three main objectives; the first of them explains what femicide is based on the crimes presented in Ciudad Juarez in order to give a complete overview of this issue, such as the impunity of the crimes and the high number of cases of women that had been assaulted. In addition to this, it was considered that more than 1.500 women had disappeared and more than 500 hundred were murdered in that city due to the assaults and acts of violence provoked by men. The second objective is related to the media and how this phenomenon becomes a well-recognized issue and was highly spread around the country. The last objective and the most important for my research, explains the causes and motivates for femicide in that country. Some
Violence takes many forms: it can be physical, psychological, sexual, economic, and even within families, or combinations of one or more of these. In most cases, the violence has been “acceptable” because of the cultural traditions that are largely respected. However, with the increasing emergence of the women’s movement internationally and even within Mexico itself, many Mexican males regard their roles as belittled. There has been a subtle and sometimes obvious backlash against the women’s movement, especially if women have independent living or income possibilities. In a culture in which violence is the norm, beatings, rape, torture, mutilation, and even murder are frequently overlooked. This has been painfully evident in the cases of mass murders of young women in Ciudad Juarez.
The first reaction upon hearing about the topic of battered men, for many people, is that of incredulity. Battered husbands are a topic for jokes (such as the cartoon image of a woman chasing her husband with a rolling-pin). One researcher noted that wives were the perpetrators in 73% of the depictions of domestic violence in newspaper comics (Saenger 1963).
This study sought to determine the perception of the residents on the social acceptability of the various forms and prevalence of violence against women. The study supposed that when people perceived the various forms of violence against women as socially acceptable, their prevalence tends to be high.
“People dominate animals, men dominate women.” Each is a relation of hierarchy, an inequality, with particularities and variations within and between them. (Cite Orange book pg. 92.) For centuries, women have been viewed and used as a man’s “property”, whether it is being used for sexual satisfaction or for the sake of bearing children and taking care of the home. Men are typically perceived as head of the household and whatever they say goes; anything to satisfy their hunger for power and control. Have women ever had a say about what they want to use their bodies for? Laws against rape may have changed over time, but men’s consistent aggressive behavior unfortunately, has not.