The Status of Women

From Barcelona Lluis Bosch writes:

"I have a postgrad in Women's Studies and Criminology (University of Middlesex, London). My present doctoral thesis focus is men's violence against women in Catalonia. Although it is true that there is a high incidence of violence against women in Spain -and particularly men attacking their own spouses- it can by no means be stated that "Spain has the highest rate of violence against women in Europe". However, one cannot assert the contrary either. The facts are that statistics point to England and Wales, and Germany, as the countries with the highest incidence in Europe. They are closely followed by Italy and Russia, with France and Poland coming in behind them. There is a group of average, formed by the Scandinavian countries, Belgium, Switzerland, etc. Spain is within this group. The lowest incidence goes to small countries like Luxembourg, Malta, etc.By the way: all European countries have lower rates of spouse-battering, rape and abuse than the USA.

However, one must be extremely cautious with such figures. It must be taken into account that in some countries, violence of a husband against his wife is not considered a crime by the police and judges(Albania, Turkey and Greece, for instance) irrespective of what the written law says. In manycountries, marital violence has been prosecuted only in very recent years -to mention only one example, marital rape was not considered a crime in England until 1986!!! (This should be a useful fact to to keep in mind for those Anglo-Saxons who tend to adopt the"holier than thou" attitude towards Latin or Islamiccountries). This means that in many countries, women are not encouraged to report attacks -and in some are actively discouraged. In other words, statistics are not based on uniform criteria and do not respond to the same research focus. Therefore, they cannot be considered comparable and are not reliable.

One must also take into account that the countries which throw higher rates of abuse tend to be those with a stronger feminist movement, with a longer history of struggle. This could account for the high rates of England and Wales, France, Italy, etc., where a lot of research has been conducted by feminists themselves, pooling from more sources than just police reports, and therefore uncovering more cases than are known to the criminal justice. Many women who do not report to the police for fear of more attacks will more easily answer to surveys conducted by women researchers.

What happens presently in Spain is that wife-battering is surfacing. Traditionally, violence within the family was considered a private affair -very much like in the traditional Anglo-saxon family where, as oral tradition has it, "a man's house is his castle"- and it was extremely difficult for a case of wife-battering to see it to court. In 1997, however, feminist and human rights movements decided to coalesce in a campaign against male violence, which thanks to media coverage and left-wing parties' support proved extremely effective and really did change popular views on violence against women. In october 1997, after a few months of nonchalance, the conservative government (who saw its popularity rapidly falling on the polls) was forced to pass a specific law enforcing harsher sentences for offenders and protective measures for battered women. During these last years, the sensitivity of Spanish people on this issue has luckily remained very high. This explains this year's Mother's Day campaign -the fact that it was carried out around Mother's Day and not on March 8, Women's Day, illustrates a conservative government's standpoint.

So, all in all, we can say that the rate of violence against women is not particularly high in Spain, or in any case there is no proof of this. According to known statistics, it is certainly much lower than in England-but, again, one cannot and should not raisecomparisons.

Undoubtedly, men's violence against women has a lot to do with male chauvinism, or "machismo". But, having known and studied male chauvinism in both Spain and England, I would not dare to say that men are more chauvinist in Spain than in England. They may be louder about it, but there again as Spaniards say "a barking dog is rarely a biting dog". Some of the episodes I have seen in England would be considered outrageous by men themselves in Spain. And in most Spanish cities, women are free to walk the streets alone and unmolested after midnight -this would be unthinkable in London or Manchester.

The allusion to Spanish islamic past as a possible cause for violence against women is simply silly and does not help at all to understand this terrible problem. Violence against women spreads worldwide, and has little to do with Islam in itself. Rather, it has a lot to do with the opression of women and violence in society in general (a good insight to this may be offered by New Zealand: the first country in the world to pass equal rights for women and with one of the lowest general crime rates in the world, also has one of the lowest rates of violence against women).

Hinting that Islam as such is more violent against women than Christianity as such is simply untrue. It is true that women are terribly opressed in islamic Afghanistan, but this has more to do with the Taliban power's misuse of religious dogma than with the religion itself. In Kenya, for instance, women are much freer -and suffer less violence and rape- in the islamic coast than in the Christian inland regions. And the law is theoretically the same in both regions. For one thing, Muslim women in Kenya are not forced to undergo clitoridectomy, whereas women in some animist and Christian tribes are.

It is easy from the Western standpoint to simplify and associate Islam with oppression of women, while implying that Christianity or Christian tradition treats women better. Whenever we are tempted by such pitfall, it would prove useful to remember that over 95% of the (known) rapes and abuse during the Jugoslav war were committed by Christian men (Orthodox Serbs or Catholic Croats) on Islamic Bosnian women. And not vice versa."

My comment: This information is very valuable, but, as Lluis says, one must be careful with staiistics, notably when it comes to the Balkans.. What he says about Sweden and Scandinavian countries surprises me. It goes counter to everything I have read. Mother 's Day was invented in the US, but a survey of the treatment of mothers gave the top ranking to Sweden and the Scandinavian countries. Britain was nine, and the US eleven.Yesterday was family day, and Spanish commentators said Spain has the worst record in Europe, presumably in the mistreatment of women. It is a sensitive and tragic subject. Lluis uses the unWAIS word "silly" to suggest that this may go back to the Islamic tradition. The vehemence of his defense of Islam is unusual in Catalonia, but it reflects a longstanding Spanish polemic. Fernando de los Ríos, an Andalusian, had a romantic idea of Moorish culture, whereas Emilia Pardo Bazán despised it. In the US there is a convention not to talk honestly about religions, except on the issue of evolution. However, the issue of the status of women in Islam cannot be swept aside. The evidence is enormous. Admittedly, the West takes a holier than thou attitude toward Islam, but that is certainly not decisive here. Christian doctrine about (not actual treatment of) women is a high ideal among world religions.

Ronald Hilton - 5/15/01