Running header: Organize the Women
Organize the Women
By Karen Schwartz
November 11, 2008
Ashford University
Cultural Anthropology
Professor Leslie Ruff
The women of the Middle East need to organize against violence in their countries and the global community needs to protect those women in the Middle East that rally for change. Women are victims of human rights violations in many areas of the world, but the recent years in the Middle East have been especially difficult for women. Reports of Women and girls who are brutally punished for “honor crimes” based on the social and religious beliefs are a commonly known practice in the Middle East.
Nobel Peace Prize winners Shirin Ebadi and Jodi Williams wrote, “We do not understand how the international community can continue to stand by while entire populations are held hostage.” How can the international community stand by while women and children are treated like animals in the namesake of religious doctrine? Many of the countries in the Middle East still abide to ancient religious laws and customs that brutalize helpless women and children. It is time for women to organize globally, empower each other to promote change in the Middle East. Women have united before to speak out against violence and the result has been imprisonment, beatings and rape.
A Pakistani peasant Women was gang raped by a local clan known as Mastoi in June, 2002. The rape was “ordered as punishment” to the Pakistani women for her brother’s indiscretion with another women in the village, (Cuny, 2006). This 32 year old women had committed no crime to any person in the village, but rumor about her 12 year old brother acting inappropriately towards another women in the village was her crime, (Cuny, 2006). In Therese Cunys book, In the Name of Honor , Mukhtar Mai relates her experience to the author as a memoir of being that Women in a remote area of...