This article appeared in the May/June 2002 issue of Soroptimist of the Americas.

Three true stories of indifference, and worse:

In 1996, a pregnant Kajal Khidr of Iraqi Kurdistan was accused of extramarital sex by her husband's relatives. They cut off her nose and threatened to kill her when her baby was born. She received medical treatment and escaped to a women's shelter. Unable to obtain assistance from her own family or elsewhere in her own country, Khidr fled abroad with the help of human rights workers.

At age 15, a girl known in immigration court documents only as Ms. G was traded to her neighbor as his wife, in order to help pay off the mortgage on her parents' farm. Her husband routinely beat and raped her, but neither her parents nor the local police would protect her. At 20, she ran away with her two children. When she was found, her mother held her down while her husband beat her; he later took the children. She fled to the United States in search of asylum, but the immigration judge told her lawyer he would order her deported back to El Salvador.

First-time offender Robin Lucas, serving a sentence at a minimum security work camp program in Dublin, Calif., had a minor altercation with another inmate and was moved to isolation in the adjacent male facility. A man entered her cell one night, having paid the guard, and attempted to rape her. Fearing for her safety, Lucas complained to the prison authorities, who did nothing. Guards then let three men enter her cell, where they raped, sodomized, and beat her. Two weeks later, Lucas was transferred back to the women's facility, but she did not receive medical attention until more than a month after the attack. This happened in 1995.

These accounts of official indifference to violence against women have been documented by Amnesty International as violations of women's human rights and also qualify as torture under the United Nations Convention against Torture. Sadly, these three women represent thousands more each year who are:

Sexually assaulted in prison as authorities leave them unprotected or, worse, charge them with a crime;

Raped repeatedly while detained during wartime, to demoralize them and their families, and as a way of ethnic cleansing, since any baby they produce is part "enemy";

Murdered by relatives for "shaming" the family by, for instance, wanting to marry someone of their own choice or being raped;

Horribly disfigured by acid thrown on them by a man they rebuffed;

Sold into debt bondage by their parents;

Sold into forced marriage or prostitution;

Burned to death by their in-laws because their dowry is too small;

The list goes on.

Women's rights a modern concept
Women have been victims of these kinds of crimes for millennia. The notion that women's rights are human rights is a very modern idea, taking root only in the last 30 years or so.

In 1979, the UN General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), the first such document in history. An international bill of rights for women, it describes discrimination against women as "any distinction, exclusion or restriction made on the basis of sex which has the effect or purpose of impairing or nullifying the recognition, enjoyment or exercise by women, irrespective of their marital status, on a basis of equality of men and women, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural, civil or any other field." As of February 2002, 73 countries had signed CEDAW (among the non-signatories are the U.S. and Britain), although many of them do not enforce it.

CEDAW was expanded in 1993 with the Declaration on Elimination of Violence against Women. It defines violence against women as "any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or mental harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life."

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