It is why Bush “has decided for the seventh year to withhold funds allocated to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), which conducts global work on issues such as reducing obstetric fistula, increasing access to contraception and family planning, HIV prevention, and improving obstetric care.” See Our Bodies, Our Blog for more information. And it is why Bush’s deeply politicized Justice Department doesn’t want to “waste money” helping trafficked, coerced women in prostitution.
What also peeves me, to put it mildly, is that the State Department made a great big show of sending Condi Rice to the UN to lead the debate on the resolution that supposedly recognized rape and sexual violence as a tactic of war, even though that had already been done by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court of 1998, under the provisions of which war criminals from Rwanda and the Balkans were tried and some convicted of mass rape. The new UN resolution does not provide sanctions, saying only that “approriate” steps can be taken “when necessary”. Gee. I’m shaking in my boots.
Even though UN Resolution 1325, passed some eight years ago, provided that women should be included in peace negotiations in the Democratic Republic of Congo, there was no one representing the over 200,000 women whose bodies and minds have been close to destroyed by sexual violence when the negotiations came about. Further, all soldiers who had committed the crime of rape were given amnesty as a result of the negotiations! I guess they’re REALLY scared now.
Add to it that the US axed another huge chunk of money from the Population Fund on June 27th, about a week after all the foo fara about the new resolution and you certainly have all the signs of a government that wants to get the “good publicity” surrounding the new UN resolution, without actually doing anything. Guess what? They’re going to do another “report” on the problem, due next June. One more year. In the meantime, no commitment to stopping the violence. No funds for the hospitals and rehab centres needed to treat the women who have been violated and often grievously injured; no money for their personal and social rehabilitation. No money for schools for the children born of rapes. Nadda.
During the year that the UN is studying, countless girls and women will die or become sexual slaves to brutal armies and pick-up militias in the DNC and Burma and Sudan.
It’s almost unbearable. The tipping point into near craziness came for me when both the UN and the US got all that great publicity for supposedly finally noticing. I realized that they’ve always noticed. They just don’t care.
Very true. Feminists have been trying to draw attention to this for decades. See, for example: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060731/nussbaum