Women have fought for their rights since the beginning of times. Substantial developments have been realized in most cases, but there are still many issues that are yet to be resolved. Here are some of the issues that have affected women since the beginning of humanity and they are still affecting them today.
Violence
Violence is not a thing of today. It was there before and will be there in the future, if the current trend continues. According to the World Health Organization, 35.6 percent of women have experienced physical or sexual violence at a certain point in their lives. Violence against women is a global epidemic. Women face violence everywhere- at work, in the streets and even at home. Consequently, violence causes more death to girls and women than traffic accidents, cancer and malaria.
Rape is perhaps the most common form of violence against women that undermines their dignity. Rape is the worst sin against humanity. Men do not seem to understand this, and I concur with Kurt Cobain when she says that rape is one of the most terrible crimes on earth and it happens every few minutes. The problem with groups who deal with rape is that they try to educate women about how to defend themselves. What really needs to be done is teaching men not to rape. Go to the source and start there
Poverty
The society is such that wealth belongs to men, and the woman is actually part of that wealth. This makes women perpetual beggars, and if things remain the way they are now, this problem will still be experienced in the future. The fact that women all over the world are now free to work away from home and own property comes as a relief for many women, but women are still paid less than their male counterparts and they only own 1% of the titled land globally. Other forms of inequalities that keep women in the poverty gap include inequality in access to resources and economic structures and inequality in sharing of power.
Inequalities and inadequacies in the access to education, training, access to health care and related issues
Men always seem to be at a higher and better level, and this has troubled women for quite some time now. For instance, according to the UN’s Millennium Development Goals report in 2007, 10 million more girls are out of school than boys globally. Moreover, of the 780 million people in the world who cannot read and write, two-thirds are women.
As if that is not enough, at the turn of the millennium, the international community promised that by 2005, there would be as many girls as boys in school. Nine years after this deadline, there is no escaping the fact that we have collectively failed to keep this promise. Despite much progress, a child without an education is still much more likely to be a girl than a boy.
Female Genital mutilation (FGM)
This traditional rite of passage is still practiced in Iraqi, Kurdistan and in 27 African countries. This is in spite of the tireless efforts to control it by WHO, UNICEF and UNFPA. On top of exposing the victim to higher risks of HIV/AIDS attack, FGM also leads to fatal bleeding, anemia and a series of urinary tract infections.
Vulnerabilities
It is true that we can do nothing about nature. Women can say that one day they will be slightly equal to men in most aspects of lifestyle. However, women are naturally more vulnerable to death, violence, rape, accidents and generally anything that is likely to cause harm to human beings than men. Perhaps it is because women are not created to be as tough and sturdy as men, and the society should understand this predicament and work towards protecting women in all dangerous situations.
Ladies first, or so they say. This saying remains only in the lips of those who say it, not in their hearts. Women have never come first in the issues that matter. In fact, women are still struggling with poverty, lack of education and female genital mutilation, to name but a few.
