Friday, December 3, 2010

TAKING IT TO THE COMMUNITY

The World Wide Web has let us built campaigns against many things. Domestic violence in October now child abuse on Facebook with people's favorite cartoon character. But this doesn't really get to the heart of the problem...

It doesn't take us to the causes of the problems. It doesn't punish the perpetrators. It doesn't salve the wounds of the victims. What we need is to get to the actual communities that these crimes are being committed.

Let's take the issues of female genital mutilation or female circumcision... This is being practiced throughout Africa even in a seemingly progressive country such as Egypt. It is reported that 91 percent of Egyptian women currently aged 19 to 45 have undergone this very dangerous procedure that is mostly rooted in culture than medicine. No matter what we do even with the help of the Egyptian government, we will not be able to completely end the practice once and for all. There will always be people who are adamant advocates of tradition, even if lethal like honor killing.

Domestic violence and child abuse are very much intertwined together and not any single city in the world is immune to them. I live in Washington DC and I always hear reports of really bad incidents. They are pretty awful here. A couple of years ago, a single mother killed her daughters and put the bodies in her freezer. The bodies were found months later after police raided her apartment.

I think the best thing to eradicate violence against women and crimes against humanity is education. We need to teach not just our leaders but our fellow ordinary citizens that domestic violence, child abuse, rape and gender violence is negatively impacting our society in more ways than one. We need to show the world that there are ways to stop these things from happening. The most basic and most important thing is raising our children that it is not all right to be abused and be ripped off our basic human dignity. We must retrain men and women what it is to treat each other with equal respect and how some old traditions and thinking must be done away with. And there are so many practical ways in doing this. For example, have a child abuse workshop at your local library or a showing of documentary at a local college campus. I've seen how getting the community involved, and not just online, gets the ball really rolling...

1 comment:

  1. Female circumcision is even practiced by some communities in india. the root of the problem maybe the mother, who takes their daughters to get circumscised.

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