Female Troubles: Women's Rights as Human Rights

[theHandpuppet]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jack-healey/female-troubles-womens-ri_b_5637460.html
Female Troubles: Women's Rights as Human Rights
Jack Healey Founder, Human Rights Action Center
07/31/2014

Why does the world seem to have so much trouble recognizing women's rights as human rights? It's not as if any can claim that women are an imported or foreign idea or something that doesn't occur in a particular culture. It's not as if any individual can claim to not know any women. Why do women's rights get so little attention? Why doesn't solving the problem get more energy from individuals, institutions, governments, and international bodies? How can anyone fail to recognize that the advancement and protection of women's full equality is a requisite to any future for human rights? No country nor international body has done enough to realize equality. With just over half of humankind being female, we can not wait any longer.

On December 10, 1948, the United Nations (UN) formally declared the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). The whole text applies to all of humanity, but it sees women's rights meriting attention enough to include particular references to them in the preamble and again in four of the Articles (2, 7, 16, and 25). With formal declaration almost 70 years past and having been promoted around the world as a foundational document for human rights, you'd expect tremendous progress to have been made for women's equality following global recognition. Unfortunately, nowhere near enough work has been done, and today women remain devalued, dismissed, and sometimes destroyed both domestically in the United States and internationally around the globe.

Women have their voices dismissed, their experiences devalued, and their lives are often on a continuum between distressed and destroyed as a result. It seems that the self-esteem and confidence of young girls, never equal to boys even when young, is decimated at and after adolescence. Perhaps when the body changes in the journey to adulthood, perhaps then girls get a larger view of how the world will generally treat them. After seeing how the world generally discriminates against and mistreats women, it is only understandable that they have their inner foundations shaken. What is to follow is often not a mere crisis of confidence, but a series of affronts against them for the simple fact that they are female in the world. Discrimination against women is faced by our mothers, sisters, daughters, partners, friends, and co-workers and is so pervasive to often go unnoticed in all but extreme cases. If we seek a world with human rights for all, it is a must to remove the barriers to those rights for women.

Domestically in the United States, women and girls experience discrimination and harm in a variety of spheres. Economically, women are subject to unequal pay, with women earning seventy seven cents to the male dollar. With court rulings allowing employers to use their religion to dictate provision of reproductive healthcare and the failure of most companies and organizations to promote and support women with parity to men, the workplace makes it difficult for women to balance job demands with family demands. Reproductive rights at-large are under renewed assault, with abortion becoming less available geographically and states passing laws to restrict access as far as they can, in spite of the likely effects not being fewer abortions but of more negative health outcomes for women and their children. In the meantime, school districts around the country very often deny girls the ability to receive sex education about their own bodies while in school, with predictable results of decisions made without information. Partner violence remains very high for American women, with a substantial number experiencing physical and emotional abuse in relationships, often young and without sufficient knowledge nor resources to help them get safe....

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[niyad]

1. let's see, we are still waiting, in this country, for the ERA and CEDAW. pretty pathetic state

of affairs in the so-called "greatest country in the world"