I am sure these reports are worth reading:

Thanks and regards.
Biomed

Disappearance of native women ignored: Groups


CANADIAN PRESS

When 16-year-old Valicia Velvet Solomon Osborne disappeared from her Winnipeg home last March, her family kept hoping that she would turn up, but they dreaded the worst.
Their dread turned to anguish seven months later when some of her severed limbs were discovered in the Red River. Valicia had become another in a long list of Canadian aboriginal women who have been murdered. Her killer has not been found.

Outside the Manitoba legislature today, aboriginal groups marked International Women's Day by calling for more public attention to such cases.

"There are children - 16- and 17-year-old women - that are disappearing off the streets of Winnipeg frequently," said Leslie Spillett of the Mother of Red Nations Council.

Spillett estimated that 500 aboriginal women across the country have vanished over the last decade. But she said they get little media attention compared with the cases of white women such as Dru Sjodin, a university student who disappeared from a mall in Grand Forks, N.D., two hours south of Winnipeg.

"There was front-page press day after day. There were organized search parties. There was a whole community effort to find where she was and to bring people to justice," Spillett said.

"That's an appropriate response. And I'm asking where is the appropriate response when one of our women go missing or end up murdered?"

Saskatoon journalist Warren Goulding found the same thing in the case of John Crawford, who murdered three aboriginal women in Saskatoon after serving time for killing another in Alberta. Goulding's book on that case is titled Just Another Indian: A Serial Killer and Canada's Indifference.

"The obvious comparison was the Paul Bernardo case," Goulding said. "Certainly you'll recall all the hoopla around the Bernardo trial in Toronto - people lined up around the block to get in and that sort of thing. Almost a year later, Crawford went on trial for killing three women in Saskatoon, and certainly there was very little national interest."

There are lists of missing women, many of them aboriginal, in every major Canadian city. In Vancouver, more than 60 have disappeared since the early 1980s, and one man alone faces 22 charges of first-degree murder.

Goulding is among many critics to suggest police do not investigate such disappearances aggressively enough, often because of the women's lifestyles on the street.

"If 500 white women went missing from Toronto and Montreal or wherever, I think there'd be absolute panic and outrage," he said. ``It just hasn't happened."

In Ottawa, about 30 aboriginal women chanting "Remember our sisters!" marched on Parliament Hill.

Dawn Harvard, Ontario president of the Native Women's Association of Canada, also questioned whether the cases would get more attention if so many of the missing women weren't poor, drug-addicted or working in the sex trade.

Women across Asia also marked the day with rallies. They called for an end to domestic violence and demanded better economic opportunities. In Bangladesh, police said more than 10,000 women attended about a dozen demonstrations in the capital of Dhaka. Some carried placards that read: Stop Violence on Women and Don't Kill Women for Dowry.

The practice of demanding a dowry - money and gifts given by a bride's family to the groom's as a condition of marriage - continues, despite a law banning it in the impoverished Muslim-majority nation.

More than 570 women - mostly from poor families - have been murdered or committed suicide since 2000 because their families failed to meet dowry demands, humans-rights group Odhikar said in a report released today.

Harvard said provincial property rights that govern fair distribution of assets during divorce disputes aren't enforced on more than 600 reserves in Canada.

That means aboriginal women who leave abusive husbands risk losing everything because there's no federal law to protect them.

"A lot of women continue to subject themselves to continued violence to at least ensure their children have a roof over their heads."

Domestic violence was also the subject of a report released in Toronto on the experiences of immigrant women and members of visible minorities.

Based on interviews with front-line workers who have dealt with the situation, the two-year national study by the Canadian Council on Social Development said domestic abuse of immigrant and visible minority women is grossly under-reported.

Ines Cesar, family services co-ordinator for an Edmonton immigrant women's agency called Changing Together, said immigrant women face all the same problems their Canadian-born sisters do - and then some.

Although the report cites language problems and cultural beliefs as particular problems for abused immigrant women, Cesar stressed most immigrants speak English and no single culture has a corner on domestic violence.

The only unique problem for immigrant women, she said, is that their abusive partners will often threaten to have them expelled from Canada by immigration authorities.

Among other things, the council report called on government to ensure immigrant women are informed of their rights under Canadian law as soon as they enter the country. Cesar echoed that call, saying many women get their only information on Canadian laws from the very person who is abusing them.

In Vancouver, women's groups staged a protest outside the constituency office of B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell, saying his government's cuts could lead to the closure of most of province's 37 women's centres.

In New Brunswick, the Advisory Council on the Status of Women released an annual report card showing a jump in the number of women in the workforce who have preschool children and calling for an increase in day-care spaces. There were spaces in 2003 for 11 per cent of New Brunswick children compared with 12 per cent nationally and 21 per cent in Quebec.

But the day wasn't all about victims. In Russia, International Women's Day dates back to the Soviet era and is still widely celebrated. President Vladimir Putin marked it by inviting 16 successful women from various walks of life to his residence outside Moscow and awarding them with state medals for their achievements.

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"Change before you have to" : Jack Welch

Minority women face more abuse


NICHOLAS KEUNG
IMMIGRATION/DIVERSITY REPORTER

Immigrant and minority women are more prone to domestic abuse, are less likely to report it and find it harder to get help when they try to flee their abusers, says a new report.

The two-year study by the Canadian Council on Social Development being released today — International Women's Day — says domestic abuse of immigrant and minority women is grossly under-reported.

"These women come to us with their mental health severely affected by all they are living as abused wives, as new immigrants, as mothers, as isolated daughters, as unemployed professionals, and as penniless women without a means of expressing their needs in a clear way to people they feel they can trust," states the 44-page report.

The researchers' analysis of a 1999 Statistics Canada survey found that 10.5 per cent of immigrant women have experienced emotional or financial abuse, while 4.2 per cent cited physical or sexual abuse.

Among the victims, only 10 per cent would report the abuse to police, and 17 per cent would seek help elsewhere, such as counselling and shelter services.

(Almost 4 million people, or 13.4 per cent of the population, identified themselves as visible minorities, according to the 2001 Census, and 68 per cent of them were immigrants.)

The qualitative study — based on focus groups with front-line workers from more than 70 agencies in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg and Halifax — noted that some women come from societies that grant them few rights. When they come to Canada, it is like a "door opening" to greater independence and self-realization. But some husbands and partners are not in favour of this liberation, it said.

Ekuwa Smith, author of the justice department-funded study, said economic adversity doesn't help.

"The context in which these abuses occur is very complex. The situation is that most of these women have already been in isolation in this country, some with shaky immigration status. Their lives rely on the persons who happen to be the abusers," Smith said in a telephone interview from Ottawa.

Smith said one key factor making these women so vulnerable is the loss of the traditional social and community supports.

"If I leave home, where am I going to go? Back home, you depend on others ... In many cases, she still depends on her parents back home to make the decision, but they don't know the situation here," one social worker told researchers. "They are likely to say, `Stay with him or you will be lost in the new country.'"

Smith pointed out that most abused immigrant women do not speak English or French, and have no access to help and information.

In some incidents police responding to a distress call from a woman had to rely on the victim's English-speaking spouse to translate. "Of course, (the husband) did not implicate himself — he blamed his wife for causing trouble."

Smith said an abusive partner often uses misleading information to keep a woman trapped in a violent situation, keeping her from discovering her options.

"A woman may be in the process of sponsoring her own family back home. If she is financially dependent on the abuser, she may be afraid to jeopardize her family sponsorship by starting over on her own," the study said.

The situation is compounded by mistrust of Canadian authorities, such as police and government workers, in part because of negative experiences with officials in the homeland.

The lack of language- and culture-specific services and resources is also a hurdle for women trying to rebuild their lives.

"These women were not allowed to have one dollar by their spouses. They have no bank account, no credit; they have never signed a lease. They are starting from scratch. How well they survive depends on the social and financial supports they receive," the report noted.

Housing and income supports are key to the survival of many such women and children, but long waiting lists for subsidized housing and inadequate social assistance often doom abuse victims to perpetual poverty.

The report recommends that:

Immigrant women be informed of their rights and Canadian laws when they arrive.

Abused women, particularly immigrants and visible minorities, be red-flagged in the court system for the cultural and language support that they need.

All levels of government reinvest in income support, affordable housing and job training, making them more adequate and accessible to abuse victims.

A multilingual public education campaign be created to reach out to potential abuse victims from all backgrounds.

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"Change before you have to" : Jack Welch

Another article that needs attention on this important day.

Here's the link

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/2946760.stm


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Domestic abuse hits India's elite


By Geeta Pandey
BBC correspondent in Delhi


A startling number of domestic violence cases are coming to light in India where the victims are women belonging to the country's elite.

Many women still will not talk about the problem
Many of the women are from the privileged English-speaking middle and upper classes often working in high-profile jobs.

Domestic violence is particularly acute in South Asia where traditionally women have been treated as the inferior sex.

Talk of domestic violence usually conjures up images of poor, illiterate women, unaware of their rights and economically dependent on their husbands for survival.

But with more and more educated women coming forward with their experiences, that view is changing.

Beaten up

Shruti's problems began three and a half years ago when she married Kumar.

My neighbours knew about it.. . but I never informed my parents

Shruti
The beatings and torture started soon after.

"He would literally beat me up, abuse me, abuse my parents. He would get drunk and there would be scenes whole night.

"My neighbours knew about it.. but I never informed my parents. I had a bad fracture [but] I told them I had slipped from the stairs."

Shruti is educated, speaks English and belongs to the upper middle-class.

She works for a well-known private firm in Delhi and makes enough money to live independently.

But she says she put up with all the abuse believing it was hers to bear for being born as a girl.

Striking back

It was only after Kumar sent her off to her parents' house and refused to take her back that she sought help.

Now, she has been doing the rounds of the Crime Against Women Cell, a special police unit to deal with cases faced by women.


Some women are fighting back
Vimla Mehra is the police officer in-charge of the unit.

She says of the 1,000 complaints they receive each month, about a quarter are from women with backgrounds similar to Shruti's.

"Earlier, women from very high classes were not complaining, but now they are aware and do not fear the social stigma as strongly as they did earlier," she says.

The social stigma may be diminishing, but the number of cases is not.

One in five women in India has faced domestic violence.

You consider yourself to be an empowered woman. You consider yourself to be independent, strong and yet it still happens to you

Manjima Bhattacharya

And the provocation for abuse can be anything from suspicion about an extra-marital affair to a badly cooked meal.

"There are people who beat their wives only because she has not prepared the food they wanted or at the time they wanted or she has not spoken well to or behaved well with her mother or father-in-law or some other relative of her husband," says Ms Mehra.

Challenge

Some say the biggest problem is convincing the women that they do not deserve abuse.

"Most women who face domestic violence think it's a normal part of their life, it's a part of being a wife, daughter or a sister in law," says Manjima Bhattacharya, who works for Jagori, a group that uses music and theatre to spread awareness about domestic violence.

"So to convince them that it's not something that they have done that provokes such a response [is] quite a challenge.

"We get cases all the time of educated women who face domestic violence, who are in abusive relationships but it's just that their walls are much higher and much thicker and you often can't hear them speak about it. It's difficult for them to come to terms with it.

"You consider yourself to be an empowered woman. You consider yourself to be independent, strong and yet it still happens to you. So how do you come to terms with it?"

That is a challenge the government and society has to deal with.

While the government is debating legislation to reduce the level of domestic violence, activists say real improvement will come only if women themselves confront their abusers.

Some names have been changed to protect identities

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Are you there?

One more.... at

http://www.indiatogether.org/2003/dec/wom-aidsscene.htm

Gender norms worsen AIDS scenario
Entrenched gender norms add new dimensions to a problem spiraling out of control, says Lalitha Sridhar.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has said in a message in connection with World AIDS Day, "...the epidemic continues its lethal march around the world, with few signs of slowing down. In the course of the past year, every minute of every day, some 10 people were infected. In the hardest-hit regions, life expectancy is plummeting. HIV/AIDS is spreading at an alarming rate among women, who now account for half of those infected worldwide."

In India, entrenched gender norms add new dimensions to a problem spiraling out of control.

Says Dr.Suniti Solomon, who documented the first HIV+ case in India in 1986, and has been involved in pioneering research under the aegis of her institution, YRG Care, "The average Indian home is very happy if a boy is born. Women are discriminated against from birth so you can imagine how vulnerable victims of HIV/AIDS can be. How many women will tell their abusive families to get lost and walk out? During our counselling sessions we find that women get blamed for everything - for being childless, for delivering a girl child and so on. If an antenatal check up reveals that the woman is HIV+, the family labels her a ‘bad’ woman of immoral character. She is considered the source of the infection, regardless of whether she is a victim herself."

"I hated my husband for ruining my life. I returned to my maternal home. I heard that my husband’s family was planning on getting him married again. I wanted to file a case against him but he died."
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• Also see: Undone by HIV/AIDS

Says P.Kousalya, President of the Positive Women’s Network in Tamil Nadu, "My marriage was fixed to my paternal aunt’s son, who was a lorry driver, much against my wishes. After my marriage my husband forced me to have sex with him, even though I was unwilling and I spent a lot of time crying unseen in my room. I spent three months with my husband’s family, after which I fell sick along with my husband. My husband tested HIV positive when he went for a checkup. My entire family knew his status, except me. Later, I found out. AIDS! The word shocked me and shattered my dreams. All I knew was that if a person had AIDS, he would die. I hated my husband for ruining my life. I returned to my maternal home. I heard that my husband’s family was planning on getting him married again. I wanted to file a case against him but he died."

Says Rakhi Sarkar, programme officer of Voluntary Services Overseas, an international development agency that works through volunteers, "Strategically, women must be the centre of the response to HIV and AIDS. By failing to place gender concerns at the heart of the response to HIV and AIDS, some interventions may actually be exacerbating the impact of HIV and AIDS on women." Poverty and deep-rooted beliefs about female and male sexuality underlie the spread and impact of HIV and AIDS.

Says a representative from Jagruti, an organization working with sex workers in India, "If a woman can’t feed herself, why would she worry about a disease that might kill her in ten years’ time? If a client offers to pay twice as much for sex without a condom, the need for money may overtake everything she knows about HIV and AIDS."

Sex work in India mainly takes place in brothels or on the street. Dalit women (from the lowest caste) are among the most vulnerable to being forced into sex work.

The National AIDS Control Organization (NACO) says 25% of the 3.97 million people living with HIV/AIDS in India are women. UNAIDS figures state that 0.8% of the total adult population (15-49) in India is living with HIV or AIDS, of which 1.5 million are women in the 15-24 age group. However, the VSO study says that many organizations and individuals disputed these figures, suggesting that insufficient surveillance sites have been set up to portray the real picture. The stigma surrounding HIV/AIDS is so extreme that the true figures may be much higher.

Says Sarkar, "Cultural norms of sexual ignorance and purity for women block their access to prevention information. Due to lack of awareness, many women in India generally have little ability to discuss or negotiate the use of condoms or their partners’ previous or concurrent sexual contacts."

The subordinate economic and social position of women within a patriarchal structure can be traced to ancient India, where some documented writings by authors like Manu and Valmiki called for absolute subservience of women to their husbands. According to some texts, the husband retains absolute control over the wife’s mind and body and has, "the right to use physical corrective methods over his erring wife." Information from this period suggests that wife-beating was considered a part of everyday life. These norms have been perpetuated by inheritance, property, and divorce laws that favour men.

Also, there is very little sex education in Indian schools. As a result, most Indian schoolchildren do not know what HIV is and children, particularly girls who dropout in larger numbers in rural and underprivileged communities, are very unlikely to be able to access prevention information.

Says Dr.Prasanna Poornachandra, of the International Centre for Prevention of Crime and Victim Care, that runs a ‘secret shelter’ for victims of domestic violence, "Women are extremely vulnerable even within marriages. Because they have nowhere else to go, they even put up with prolonged periods of abuse in return for promises of ‘everything will be all right now.’ Where is the question of negotiating condom use when she cannot even protect herself from physical abuse?"

Unequal rights to property mean that women may be forced out of their homes when widowed or diagnosed with HIV. Most women in India are landless. They are seldom given a share in parental property or able to own other assets. The Hindu Succession Act 1956 recognized the right of women to inherit the property of their father, and an amendment of the Act to confer these property rights in a joint family is under consideration. However, this Act does not apply to women belonging to non-Hindu religious communities, and is rarely implemented even in the case of Hindu women.

The burden of caring for the sick falls predominantly on women, compounding their domestic responsibilities and reinforcing stereotypes about gender roles.

Different ministries do not prioritize HIV/AIDS because it is seen as a health issue, and coordination across ministries leaves much to be desired. Donor agencies have focussed more on the south of the country, where services, though not of a desirable standard, are better than in the rest of the country.

The Tambaram Sanitarium in Chennai, the largest facility in Asia for tuberculosis treatment, has become a de facto centre for HIV/AIDS treatment thanks to an exclusive ward devoted to PLWHA. Nevertheless, corruption is rampant and it is not uncommon to find patients sharing the premises with pigs and rodents. An activist says, "Cleanups and whitewashing is engineered before some dignitary, particularly a foreign one, arrives on inspection. Otherwise, patients sometimes have to sleep on the floor and bribe everyone from the ward boy to the pharmacist to get medicines which are supposed to be available free."

In Chennai’s outlying suburb of Pallavaram, Zonta International, an NGO, began a rehabilitation home for sex workers close to nine years back. Every woman in the floating population of twenty seven odd inmates here is AIDS positive. The need for an organization willing to accept these forsaken women was felt when the government "rescued" them but they still had nowhere to go. Here lives Kamla (name changed) - the malnourished result of years of neglect, sold by her family to a potential employer who turned out to be a pimp, sexually abused and physically battered, looking forty-five though she is not yet thirty. Dying faster now than she was before, Kamla is also a terminal victim of fully developed AIDS. When she cries, as she is often wont to, it is unclear what causes her greater grief - whether it is because visitors sometimes refuse the tea she makes for them or the fact that all three of her letters to her "found" family have gone unanswered. ⊕

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Are you there?

Another one...


Too detailed to post, so here's the link.

http://bihartimes.com/poverty/anant_pandey.html

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Are you there?

One more, at The Hindu



Fight discrimination on all fronts, women told

By Our Staff Reporter


HYDERABAD, MARCH 8. A huge congregation of women's groups from all over the State gathered at Nizam College grounds here on Monday to celebrate International Women's Day and resolved to take the movement forward unitedly to fight oppression, domestic violence, atrocities and discrimination against women.

About 5,000 women across the State were mobilised to meet and celebrate the occasion by the organisations working for women's rights - Asmitha, Oxfam, Action Aid India, Plan International, Catholic Relief Services, AP Mahila Samatha Society, Centre for World Solidarity and AP Women's Network through their sub-groups in various districts.

It was not enough to attend the meetings but they should assert their rights and oppose discrimination on the home front and outside in their day-to-day life. Unless women realised their strengths and would not remain confined to the roles they had been assigned to, the exploitation and oppression would continue, said the speakers.

K.Subhadra, noted writer of Dalit literature, who released posters motivating the women to realise their goals, said the Dalit women suffered atrocities both on account of their community and gender. Their representation in DWCRA groups was negligible.

K.Lalitha of Anveshi said that women who worked to earn their own money should also put their foot down against biased treatment. Atrocities did not mean physical violence as rape and beating alone but even denial of access to health care and other necessities, she noted.

Jaya of the AP Mahila Vedika said the time had come to agitate against state violence and indifference. The delay in passing legislation for reservation to women in Parliament, law against domestic violence could be categorised under state atrocities against women. The Government was only playing a fraud on women in the name of DWCRA funds. While the amount the women got was meagre, they were being kept away from raising their concerns about serious issues such as arrack and atrocities. The perpetrators of crime against women were being allowed to go scot-free by the courts, she alleged.

The two-day celebrations that began on Sunday had detailed discussions on the problems faced by women of all classes, and Dalits and minorities in particular, with focus on domestic violence, trafficking and discrimination. Three parallel workshops on `Domestic violence', `Panchayat Raj and Governance' and `Trafficking' organised at the venue, to generate awareness, evoked a good response from the participants.

A special issue of `Bhumika' a magazine dedicated to women's issues brought out by its editor Satyavathi, was released by feminist writer Abburi Chaya Devi.

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Are you there?

BL thanks for such a great article... I am sure it would be an eye opener for quite a few desis.

And thnaks for supporting (unintentionally ) my post in Vadematram thread....We all know because of high influx of immigrants from rural India to urban India is a major cause of all these problems.

Thanks again.
Regards.
Biomed

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"Change before you have to" : Jack Welch