SOUTH ASIA CONFRONTS TREND OF VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN

May 5, 2005 - (Reuters) Changing laws is the easy part, changing attitudes is something else.Shameful stories in recent days of horrific rapes in Pakistan and India, murders in Afghanistan and an impoverished Bangladeshi mother offering to sell an eye have all underscored how far South Asia has to go to give downtrodden womenfolk justice.

Delegates from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka were meeting in Islamabad this week for a conference to review how efforts over the past decade to promote the women's agenda was faring in a region rife with stories of rapes, acid attacks, honour and dowry killings, and human trafficking.

"There's a lot of law writing, standard setting, programmes being planned, but whether any of this is having a change on the ground situation? People working on the ground say no,"Radhika Coomaraswamy, a former UN special rapporteur on violence against women, told Reuters.

"The biggest problem in South Asia we find is that people are using culture and religion to deny women's rights,"she said, adding that this was regardless of whether the reactionaries were Hindu, Muslim or Buddhist.

She believed that South Asian men felt threatened by social cultural changes, partly spread by globalisation and mass media, and women were bearing the brunt of their fears.

"Let's study masculinity in South Asian men for a change, and find out whether that maybe can give us a clue as to why women are not moving forward."

A UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) prepared for the Islamabad meeting noted violence against women in South Asia was on the rise, based on cases reported to the police.

The data may be raw, but even then so many cases go unreported that it renders the size of the problem almost invisible, according to Coomaraswamy, now director of the International Centre for Ethnic Studies in Colombo.

The media has played a major role in exposing the plight of women in South Asia.

Late last month in Bangladesh, 26-year-old Shefali Begum offered to sell one of her eyes in desperation to earn enough money to feed her 2 year old daughter.

In Afghanistan, bodies of three women were found on the roadside on Monday. They had been raped and strangled. Their killers left a note warning other women not to work with aid organisations.

And in India yesterday, rights groups were outraged when a court allowed a man convicted of raping and partly blinding a young nurse to offer to marry his victim. He was sentenced to life in prison after the woman refused the offer.

"Men feel women are going out of their control," said Coomaraswamy, adding "They try to control them through violence."

For the past week Pakistani newspapers have highlighted the case of 17-year-old Nazish Asghar, who threatened self-immolation unless the government ensured there would be no protection for men, including police officers, she has accused of rape.

The student said she was abducted and gang-raped over 37 days, and then raped by police after being rescued.

Nilofar Bakhtiar, special advisor on women's affairs to Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, said women are becoming more confident in reporting such crimes to police, but many still believe that remaining silent is the safer course of action.

While Pakistan recently introduced legislation to outlaw honour killings, it has still to review Islamic hudud laws governing rape. Bakhtiar hopes there will be changes soon.

"Our main focus is on the part where 'zina' (adultery) is involved,"she explained. "When a woman goes to the police station to report a rape case, if she does not have four (male) witnesses ... she is put behind bars for adultery."

After running into stiff resistance from leaders of Pakistan's feudal rural communities over the law on honour killing, Bakhtiar knows she faces a stiffer battle over the hudud ordinance.

Noeleen Heyzer, executive director of the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), said enlightenment must prevail if women are to be given a chance of justice, and they must translate greater political representation into real influence.

"If we don't look at the power structure we won't end impunity," Heyzer said, advocating quotas like those in place in Pakistan to give women a greater say.

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