So, the Taliban tried and failed to kill Malala Yousafzai and now she’s famous, is getting a book contract and everything. That has to be frustrating for your average medieval patriarch. So, how does one compensate?
“A teacher in Pakistan has been murdered in an attack similar to that on Malala Yousafzai, the schoolgirl blogger.
Shahnaz Nazli was shot dead in Shahkas, near the town of Jamrud in the Khyber tribal district, between the north-western city of Peshawar and the Afghan border.
Reports said the 41-year-old was hit in what as described as a drive-by shooting.
According to the AFP news agency, the teacher was on her way to the government girls’ primary school in Shahkas when gunmen fired at her about 200 metres from the school and then fled the scene.
“The teacher was killed after unknown gunmen on a motorbike shot her and fled,” said a local government official, Asmatullah Wazir.
No groups have so far claimed responsibility for Tuesday’s attack, though the Taliban has previously been behind numerous attacks on girls’ schools and teachers. Hundreds of schools have been bombed and destroyed in the tribal areas of Pakistan.”
Of course, the Taliban do not have the monopoly of gender violence. The rape culture in South Africa has had devastating consequences, especially in light of the Pistorius case:
“”The massive problem we need to understand in South Africa is the level of men’s violence against women and against each other,” said Lisa Vetten, a researcher who specialises in domestic abuse. Police statistics on domestic violence are limited. But 15,609 murders and 64,500 reported rapes in 2011-12 suggest massive levels of violence in South African homes.
Household surveys by the MRC have found that 40% of men have hit their partner and one in four men have raped a woman. Three-quarters of men who admit to having raped women say they did so first as teenagers. The MRC found that, while a quarter of women had been raped, just 2% of those raped by a partner reported the incident to police.
Experts say South African society features all the known causes of rape and violence, including a historical culture of “might is right”, a wealth gap that makes men feel weak, an unequal relationship between women and men, lack of adequate childcare, which results in the neglect of boys, and high male unemployment.
Jewkes, a British doctor and director of gender and health at the MRC, said: “Having a father at home is really unusual here. South African children are more likely to be raised by a non-biological parent than by both biological parents. So you see high levels of neglect, humiliation and abuse, which develops into domestic violence. We also have a high rate of teenage pregnancies and those young mothers are not equipped to raise their children.
“South African men think women should be under their control. There is an idea that violence is justifiable as a means to keep women in their place. This has not changed in 20 years and even though the South African murder rate has dropped by 50% since 1999, rape figures have not,” said Jewkes.”
But there are some positive developments out of Ecuador:
“Ecuador hopes to move forward in the fight against violence against women by typifying femicide – gender-motivated killings – as a specific crime in the new penal code.
The first statistics on gender violence in this South American country were presented in 2012, indicating that 60 percent of women had suffered some kind of mistreatment.
The aim now is to include the crime of femicide in the penal code reform introduced in Congress in late 2011. The new code is expected to be approved by the legislature to be sworn in on May 24.
The bill describes femicide as the murder of a woman “because she is a woman, in clearly established circumstances.”
It goes on to describe these circumstances: the perpetrator unsuccessfully attempted to establish or re-establish an intimate relationship with the victim; they had family or conjugal relations, lived together, were boyfriend/girlfriend, friends or workmates; the murder was the result of the “reiterated manifestation of violence against the victim” or of group rites, with or without a weapon.
Femicide is to be punishable by up to 28 years in prison – similar to the sentence handed to hired killers.”
Although:
“Ecuador thus follows on the heels of other Latin American countries that have adopted femicide in their legislation: Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico and Peru.
However, in several of those countries – most notoriously Mexico and Guatemala – the classification of femicide as a crime has failed to reduce the wave of violence against women.”
It might be because femicide is tied to other social and cultural issues that governments have a hard time controlling (such as a deeply macho culture and drug trafficking). Still, at least it might raise awareness.