[lbo-talk] Honor Killing and Domestic Violence in Germany

[KJ]

On 12/7/05, Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote:
> sharif islam sharif.islam at gmail.com
> Tue Dec 6 08:09:15 PST 2005:
> > However, can you totally ignore the religious influence?
>
> Criticism of the role of religion in gender oppression is surely
> necessary and appropriate if it is offered in a feminist context that
> doesn't claim any particular religion has monopoly of violence
> against women...
>
> The dominant media -- as in the case of Peter Schneider's article --
> tends to suggest that, when Muslim men commit violence against women,
> it is their religion or culture that's the problem, but ,when non-
> Muslim German men commit violence against women, it is just that the
> particular non-Muslim men are bad men, their badness having little or
> nothing to do with their religion or culture.  That's the double
> standard that we ought to combat.

For some kind of an evidence-based approach, the recent WHO report on
violence against women is a good starting point. Seems like it's the
first multi-country study, unfortunately not covering all that many,
but enough to suggest attributions to religion and culture in any
simplistic fashion isn't going to cut it. [But poor Margaret Mead:
Samoa's in the study and it's got one of the highest rates of physical
and sexual violence against women by an intimate partner -- Peru has
the highest, followed by Ethiopia, Bangladesh and Samoa; JP has the
lowest, while urban Thailand shockingly high with an ever incidence
rate of 23%; in a 2002 report, the incidence rate (not sure
comparable) for the US was also in the region of around 20%].

URL for 2005 report:
http://www.who.int/gender/violence/who_multicountry_study/en/index.html

kj