Happy International Women’s Day 2007

Before I share with you some rather depressing statistics, I’d like to wish everyone a happy International Women’s Day 2007!

The International Women’s Day has been celebrated in one form or another since the beginning of the twentieth century and is now celebrated worldwide on 8 March every year.

This year’s theme for the Internation Women’s Day is “Take action to end impunity for violence against women and girls” and according to UN this is where we are at:

• Violence against women is the most common but least punished crime in the world.
• It is estimated that between 113 million and 200 million women are demographically “missing”. They have been the victims of infanticide (boys are preferred to girls) or have not received the same amount of food and medical attention as their brothers and fathers.
• The number of women forced or sold into prostitution is estimated worldwide at anywhere between 700,000 and 4,000,000 per year. Profits from sex slavery are estimated at seven to twelve billion US dollars per year.
• Globally, women between the age of fifteen and forty-four are more likely to be maimed or die as a result of male violence than through cancer, malaria, traffic accidents or war combined.
• At least one out of every three women has been beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused in her lifetime. Usually, the abuser is a member of her own family or someone known to her. Domestic violence is the largest form of abuse of women worldwide, irrespective of region, culture, ethnicity, education, class and religion.
• It is estimated that more than two million girls are genitally mutilated per year, a rate of one girl every fifteen seconds.
• Systematic rape is used as a weapon of terror in many of the world’s conflicts. It is estimated that between 250,000 and 500,000 women in Rwanda were raped during the 1994 genocide.
• Studies show the increasing links between violence against women and HIV and demonstrate that HIV-infected women are more likely to have experienced violence, and that victims of violence are at higher risk of HIV infection.(source: UN)

Happy International Women’s Day indeed!

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