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	What will it take to end violence against women? by Ruth Rosen Open Democracy   Feb 2013   Twenty years after the United Nations declared violence against women to be a violation of their human rights, we are still a long way from gender violence becoming unacceptable in a society. The outrage in India has ignited a necessary international conversation about rape and violence against women worldwide.   Her father had a dream that his daughter would be educated and, like his sons, enjoy civil rights and liberties. He was one of those unsung fathers who have played an important role in promoting the goals of feminism, yet remain invisible among the many more fathers who cannot embrace change in their societies.   Millions of women are raped every year. Why this particular gang rape and subsequent death caused an international eruption of anger is not easy to explain. Often, one single act shines a light on injustice: the "Arab spring" began when a poor vendor set himself on fire; Vietnam anti-war protests grew after monks turned themselves into swirling flames.   Many who protested in India used the language of human rights to denounce the rape and other forms of violence that keep women off the streets and frightened by the “customs” of rape, wife beating, honor killings, and dowry deaths. In India, authorities responded by created all-female taxi cabs and special victim units within the notoriously corrupt police forces who have been known to rape a woman after she reported the crime. They declared New Delhi as unsafe for women.   It has taken a very long time for the people of the world to realize that violence against women constitutes a violation against their human rights. Early attempts in the United States during the 1970s to redefine rape as an assault, rather than as an act of lust, ignited an international conversation and debate about the nature of rape.   But it wasn’t until 1993, at the United Nation’s World Conference on Human Rights held in Vienna, that women around the world testified about how violence—or the threat of violence—kept them off the streets, prevented them from earning a livelihood, and made them fear the “customs” that allowed their relatives to throw acid in their faces or beat them, and even kill them, if they acted in a way that dishonored the men of their family.   Women rights advocates around the world deployed a brilliant strategy at that conference by using the testimony of ordinary women to influence the United Nation’s conference. The Center for Women"s Global Leadership at Rutger"s university in the United States played an important role in finding women from all continents who were willing to testify about the violence they had experienced-- domestic abuse, mutilation, burning and rape---when they tried to unionize, when they “dishonored their families” by flirting or engaging in pre-marital or extra-marital sex, or when they simply went out in public alone. These testimonies moved the UN to create a High Commission of Human Rights and more important, to write a resolution that violence against women was a violation of their human rights.   The General Assembly passed that resolution in March, 1993. Although enforcement was impossible, the resolution created a moral compass by which countries could judge each other.   Naturally, nations fought fiercely over this resolution. China, Syria, Iran, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam argued that cultural relativism was essential to global peace and mutual respect. The same argument, of course, had been used to defend slavery in the nineteenth century. But other nations stood up for human rights for women and dared to call a custom a crime. The American Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, spoke out strongly against accepting gender violence and said, “We cannot let cultural relativism become the last refuge of repression. The conference concluded with the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, which, for the first time, declared that violence against women violated their human rights.   One year later, in 1994, the American Congress followed by passing legislation called The Violence against Women Act (VAWA). Then, in 1995, First Lady Hillary Clinton made international news when, in a rousing and inspiring speech at the Fourth World Conference on Women, she boldly declared, "It is time for us to say here in Beijing, and for the world to hear, that it is no longer acceptable to discuss women"s rights as separate from human rights,"   In the wake of the Balkan wars in the former Yugoslavia, the media began to report that all sides had built “rape camps” and that rape and other sexual atrocities had become a deliberate and systematic part of the Bosnian and Serb campaigns for victory in the war. Strong and persistent demands for a decisive response to these outrages came from around the globe.   Still, women remained what they had always been, the “spoils of war.” The countless rapes committed during the Balkan wars revealed to the world, with the help of international media and human rights activists, that the rape of women was deliberately being used to undermine the morale of the enemy. Gradually, advocates of women’s human rights began to challenge another of the world’s longest crimes against women—rape during armed conflict.   In 2002 human right activists successfully fought for the International Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court to declare rape during war as a crime against humanity or as a war crime. Yet, as the American invasion and occupation of Iraq continued, the sexual terrorism women experienced at the hands of American soldiers and Iraqi thugs was one of the most underreported crimes of a war that been waged for resources, by choice, and fueled by the lies of America’s highest officials, including former President George W. Bush, former Secretary of Defense General Colin Powell, and former National Security Advisor, Condoleeza Rice.   No, there were no mass weapons of destruction, but countless women died in the frenzy of sexual terrorism that took place, particularly in cities. In 2006, based on human rights documents, I described what Amnesty International and other had witnessed and documented:   " The invasion and occupation of Iraq has had the effect of humiliating, endangering, and repressing Iraqi women in ways that have not been widely publicized in the mainstream media: As detainees in prisons run by Americans, they have been sexually abused and raped; as civilians, they have been kidnapped, raped, and then sometimes sold for prostitution; and as women -- and, in particular, as among the more liberated women in the Arab world -- they have increasingly disappeared from public life, many becoming shut-ins in their own homes".   Controlling women’s access to public life, including work, is one of the consequences of rape. That is why women activists created “Take Back the Night” marches in which women and men protested the brutal rapes, including gang rapes, that make women fearful of taking their rightful place in public life.   No United Nations resolution or action by the International Criminal Court is going stop what is still considered normal all over the world. As nations modernize, and women enter the labor force and enjoy higher education, they pose a threat to some men’s deeply-held belief that women belong in the private world of the home, and that they own the public sphere. Women who trespass risk being stopped, often by rape.   Yet, it is in precisely such modernizing nations, such as India, that the daytime gang rape of a 23 year-old young woman on a bus created such outrage and protest, by both men and women. UN resolutions and conventions create a moral compass and are necessary, but they do not initiate social change. At best, they alter the zeitgeist. It is incidents of brutality against women, protested by ordinary men and women, as well as by advocates for women’s human rights, that can, potentially, change people’s views about violence against women.   And it’s not just in developing countries that ending violence against women is tacitly accepted by authorities. As I write, the U.S. Senate will finally introduce legislation which reauthorizes the Violence Against Women Act, first enacted in 1994. They have even accepted the compromise of exempting certain immigrant women with particular visas. If it passes, the bill will then go to the House of Representative, where right-wing Republicans are working overtime to prevent the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act.   They insist on excluding particular categories of immigrant women and even if the Senate passes what they want, they will come up with another reason to oppose it. Last year, Republicans blocked the bill because they refused to include LGBT and Native American women in the legislation. It’s still not clear it will pass in 2013, here in a country that prides itself the great equality women have supposedly achieved.   In the early nineteenth century, few people in Europe or the United States, would have thought that slavery would one day become unacceptable to the majority of the world’s citizens. Twenty years after the U.N. declared violence against women to be a violation of their human rights, we are still a long way from gender violence becoming a relic of the past. But that is our goal. And the only way this change will happen is the same way that abolitionists ended slavery---through decades of social movement action and education that sought to end slavery.   We are not nearly there. Rape and all kinds of gender violence are still ubiquitous, and a disgrace to our global efforts to expand our ideas about human rights. It will take many more decades before everyone agree that violence at home, at work, and on the battlefield are not customs, but are, in fact, crimes against humanity. Visit the related web page
	The Minimum Wage, Guns, Healthcare, And The Meaning of a Decent Society by Robert Reich USA   March 2013   The Sequester and the Tea Party Plot   Imagine a plot to undermine the government of the United States, to destroy much of its capacity to do the public’s business, and to sow distrust among the population.   Imagine further that the plotters infiltrate Congress and state governments, reshape their districts to give them disproportionate influence in Washington, and use the media to spread big lies about the government.   Finally, imagine they not only paralyze the government but are on the verge of dismantling pieces of it.   Far-fetched? Perhaps. But take a look at what’s been happening in Washington and many state capitals since Tea Party fanatics gained effective control of the Republican Party, and you’d be forgiven if you see parallels.   Tea Party Republicans are crowing about the “sequestration” cuts beginning today (Friday). “This will be the first significant tea party victory in that we got what we set out to do in changing Washington,” says Rep. Tim Huelskamp (Kan.), a Tea Partier who was first elected in 2010.   Sequestration is only the start. What they set out to do was not simply change Washington but eviscerate the U.S. government — “drown it in the bathtub,” in the words of their guru Grover Norquist – slashing Social Security and Medicare, ending worker protections we’ve had since the 1930s, eroding civil rights and voting rights, terminating programs that have helped the poor for generations, and making it impossible for the government to invest in our future.   Sequestration grew out of a strategy hatched soon after they took over the House in 2011, to achieve their goals by holding hostage the full faith and credit of the United States – notwithstanding the Constitution’s instruction that the public debt of the United States “not be questioned.”   To avoid default on the public debt, the White House and House Republicans agreed to harsh and arbitrary “sequestered” spending cuts if they couldn’t come up with a more reasonable deal in the interim. But the Tea Partiers had no intention of agreeing to anything more reasonable. They knew the only way to dismember the federal government was through large spending cuts without tax increases.   Nor do they seem to mind the higher unemployment their strategy will almost certainly bring about. Sequestration combined with January’s fiscal cliff deal is expected to slow economic growth by 1.5 percentage points this year – dangerous for an economy now crawling at about 2 percent. It will be even worse if the Tea Partiers refuse to extend the government’s spending authority, which expires March 27.   A conspiracy theorist might think they welcome more joblessness because they want Americans to be even more fearful and angry. Tea Partiers use fear and anger in their war against the government – blaming the anemic recovery on government deficits and the government’s size, and selling a poisonous snake-oil of austerity economics and trickle-down economics as the remedy.   They likewise use the disruption and paralysis they’ve sown in Washington to persuade Americans government is necessarily dysfunctional, and politics inherently bad. Their continuing showdowns and standoffs are, in this sense, part of the plot.   What is the President’s response? He still wants a so-called “grand bargain” of “balanced” spending cuts (including cuts in the projected growth of Social Security and Medicare) combined with tax increases on the wealthy. So far, though, he has agreed to a gross imbalance — $1.5 trillion in cuts to Republicans’ $600 billion in tax increases on the rich.   The President apparently believes Republicans are serious about deficit reduction, when in fact the Tea Partiers now running the GOP are serious only about dismembering the government.   And he seems to accept that the budget deficit is the largest economic problem facing the nation, when in reality the largest problem is continuing high unemployment (some 20 million Americans unemployed or under-employed), declining real wages, and widening inequality. Deficit reduction now or in the near-term will only make these worse. Besides, the deficit is now down to about 5 percent of GDP – where it was when Bill Clinton took office. It is projected to mushroom in later years mainly because healthcare costs are expected to rise faster than the economy is expected to grow, and the American population is aging.   These trends have little or nothing to do with government programs. In fact, Medicare is far more efficient than private health insurance.   I suggest the President forget about a “grand bargain.” In fact, he should stop talking about the budget deficit and start talking about jobs and wages, and widening inequality – as he did in the campaign. And he should give up all hope of making a deal with the Tea Partiers who now run the Republican Party.   Instead, the President should let the public see the Tea Partiers for who they are — a small, radical minority intent on dismantling the government of the United States. As long as they are allowed to dictate the terms of public debate they will continue to hold the rest of us hostage to their extremism.   Feb 2012   The Minimum Wage, Guns, Healthcare, And The Meaning of a Decent Society.   Raising the minimum wage from $7.25 to $9 should be a no-brainer. Republicans say it will cause employers to shed jobs, but that’s baloney. Employers won’t outsource the jobs abroad or substitute machines for them because jobs at this low level of pay are all in the local personal service sector (retail, restaurant, hotel, and so on), where employers pass on any small wage hikes to customers as pennies more on their bills. States that have a minimum wage closer to $9 than the current federal minimum don’t have higher rates of unemployment than do states still at the federal minimum.   A mere $9 an hour translates into about $18,000 a year — still under the poverty line. When you add in the Earned Income Tax Credit and food stamps it’s possible to barely rise above poverty at this wage, but even the poverty line of about $23,000 understates the true cost of living in most areas of the country.   Besides, the proposed increase would put more money into the hands of families that desperately need it, allowing them to buy a bit more and thereby keep others working.   A decent society should do no less.   Some conservatives say “decency” has nothing to do with it. Who has the right to decide what’s decent? We should let the “market” decide what people are paid.   This is one of the oldest conservative canards in existence, based on the false claim that there’s something called a “market” that exists separate from society. But there’s no “market” in a state of nature, just survival of the fittest.   A society necessarily determines how the “market” is to be organized. Standards of morality and decency play a large role in those decisions.   We set minimum standards for worker safety and consumer protection. We decide young children shouldn’t be in the labor force.   We do our best to prevent certain things from being bought and sold — such as slaves, dangerous narcotics, babies, votes, sex with children, machine guns, nuclear material.   We decide citizens shouldn’t have to buy certain things that should instead be available to everyone free of charge (paid in effect by all of us through our taxes) – such as clean drinking water, K-12 schools, safe bridges, protection from violence, public parks.   Opinions may differ about what decency requires, and we hash it out in a democracy. We might decide certain minimum standards are too costly or inefficient, or can’t be enforced, or impose unwarranted constraints on our freedoms.   Different societies come up with different answers. Handguns are banned in most other advanced nations, for example. Workers have more protections than they do in the United States. Minimum wages are higher. Taxes on the wealthy are higher. Healthcare is more universally available.   Every society must necessarily decide for itself what decency requires. That’s the very meaning of a “society.”   Don’t fall for the mindless assertion that “markets” know best. Markets are human creations, requiring human beings to decide how they are structured and maintained.   The questions we face – whether to raise the minimum wage, restrict the availability of guns, expand healthcare coverage, and countless other decisions – inevitably require us to define what we mean by a decent society.   *Robert Reich is the Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. Visit the related web page
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