Mass Murder of Women

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I'm bringing a horrible story to this blog today...

A story about how "Every two to four years the world looks away from a victim count on the scale of Hitler's Holocaust."

A story I first saw in the excellent blog, Would Your Mother Be Ashamed?, then followed into The Christian Science Monitor.

Here are some of the facts:

• "In countries where the birth of a boy is preferred, selective abortion and infanticide eliminate female babies.

• "Young girls die disproportionately from neglect because food and medical attention is given first to males.

• "In countries where women are considered the property of men, their fathers and brothers can murder them for choosing their own sexual partners.

• "The brutal international sex trade kills uncounted numbers of girls.

• "Domestic violence is a major reason for the deaths of women in every country.

• "Six thousand girls undergo genital mutilation every day, according to the World Health Organization. Many die, and others live the rest of their lives in crippling pain."

This sickens me. It's been going on for millennia and it's intolerable!

There have been many efforts to get at the roots of the problem and explore methods to eliminate this pernicious "gendercide". One of the best I've found was: A summary report of a Symposium on Strategies for Creating Violence-Free Families, initiated by the Bahá'í International Community and co-sponsored by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), and the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM).

In that document, it's said:

"The links between violence in the family and social, structural and political violence are inescapable."

Feeling helpless about social injustice brings me to my best human refuge and first means of defense against hopelessness--Prayer...