Washington -- U.S. embassies around the
world organized 16 days of activities focused on the problem
of violence against women to draw a symbolic link between
the International Day Against Violence Against Women --
November 25 -- and International Human Rights Day -- December
10.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in
her directive to all U.S. embassies, called for engagement
with host country governments, civil society and media.
Preventing violence against women worldwide
is part of President Bush’s Freedom Agenda. Regarded
as having reached “epidemic proportions,” violence
against women includes rape, sex trafficking, domestic abuse
and honor-related crimes.
A DEPLORABLE PART OF MANY CULTURES
Unfortunately, violence against women is
accepted in many cultures that regard such behavior as “a
private family matter,” says Andrea Bottner, the senior
coordinator for the U.S. Department of State’s Office
of International Women’s Issues.
“Culturally, there are attitudes that
women are ‘less’ than men, women ‘deserve’
to be treated this way, abused this way, because they are
‘less’ than men or because they don’t
deserve the same respect or social standing that men would
get in a culture. I think you will find levels of those
feelings in every culture,” she said in a recent interview
in Budapest, Hungary, with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
Bottner was in Budapest to attend an international conference
on the changing role of women.
“Everybody in the community needs
to be part of the solution,” Bottner said, calling
for broad education and awareness programs to change cultural
attitudes about women. Especially crucial in combating violence
against women, she said, is the involvement of law enforcement
officials, prosecutors, judges, nongovernmental organizations,
community activists and health and mental health professionals.
Bottner said the U.S. Congress is working
on legislation dealing with international violence against
women, which will be modeled on the Violence Against Women
Act that was passed in the United States in 1994.
“Eliminating violence against women
has long been a goal of the United States in our foreign
policy,” Bottner said. “We continue to make
the case that violence against women is a human rights abuse,
a criminal issue.”
For more information, see a transcript of
Bottner’s interview and the USINFO collection Women
in the Global Community.
Jane Morse
/ USINFO Staff Writer
###
