Reasons why we must go against Shari Law and attain equality for Women

Real Lives

Women's rights, women's plights

Despite our strides toward equality, women around the world continue to be mistreated. This special report documents the 10 most horrific crimes against women, and honours the victims and heroes.

By Karen Mazurkewich

Imagine a life with no rights or freedoms at home, school and work. Picture a future as a sex slave spirited away from loved ones and sold for profit. What if refusing an arranged marriage meant death? Suppose school at any age was forbidden? Around the world, thousands -- perhaps millions -- of women and young girls face this kind of desperate destiny.

Despite Herculean efforts to promote a woman's right to a life free of violence and injustice, basic freedoms are still prohibited, and brutal injustices are common around the globe. There are countries where women are banished from classrooms and parliaments. The majority of the world's women cannot own, inherit or control property, land or wealth on an equal basis. Slavery, female genital mutilation, honour killings, bride burnings and forced prostitution still exist.

Even in Canada, women are not guaranteed safety. Every 17 minutes, a woman is raped somewhere in this country; the CIA has identified Canada as a major transit port for trafficking women into the United States; 700,000 women here have been victims of domestic violence; and the current percentage of Canadian women elected to Parliament is lower than in countries such as as the central Asian republic of Turkmenistan.


Which violations are the most grave? There is no master list or index. Human rights organizations document abuses by country. So in this report, Homemaker's has compiled stories from women around the world. Behind the documents assembled every year by groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International are countless stories of real women. Here are some of them.

For more than five years, David Feingold, head of the NGO Ophidian Research Institute, has documented the trafficking of women in the Golden Triangle, the notorious border region between Burma, Laos and Thailand. Ten years ago, most sex workers were from big cities like Bangkok. Today, he says, "Networks of recruiters are now reaching into the remote mountain villages to buy, abduct or lure minority women into the pipeline that feeds the lowest levels of the Thai sex industry."

Comments collected from brothel owners are chilling. "If I can sell her virginity twice, I double my investment," says one.

Feingold believes up to 250,000 women are in the Thai sex trade. Mami Sato of the Global Alliance Against Trafficking Women in Thailand says fewer urban women are prostituted, but the number trafficked from hill tribes is rising by 10,000 every year. The sex-trade industry is worth at least $22 billion annually as a by-product of the drug trade, and represents up to 14 per cent of the country's gross domestic product.

A 1999 CIA report says 40,000 to 80,000 women are trafficked from Thailand each year; 20,000 to 50,000 from China; and 25,000 to 50,000 from the Philippines. Worldwide, an estimated 700,000 to two million women are used as barter. Many go to Japan. According to the Japan Immigration Association's statistics, 46.5 per cent of illegal female migrants in 1993 were "hostesses" or in direct prostitution. Many women voluntarily start the journey but end up in debt bondage, compelled to submit to dozens of clients a night. Very few manage to escape, and most who do have sexually transmitted diseases such as AIDS. This modern form of slavery is not restricted to Asia or to uneducated women. Born in Ukraine, Olexandra, 23, had a university education and a two-year-old daughter to support. When a distant relative from Germany promised work, she left with a false passport. At the Polish border, her fake passport was confiscated and she was locked into a building, raped, beaten and forced into prostitution. When the brothel owners were finally arrested, Olexandra was deported back to Ukraine. Now she is under the wing of La Strada, a Ukrainian organization helping trafficked women.

Canada is often used as a way station for women being smuggled into the U.S. In 1999, the American embassy in Seoul issued an alert about traffickers capitalizing on Canadian visa waivers. Koreans were apparently delivering women through Canada into the U.S., where they enter without inspection.

One Vancouver-based organization called West Coast Players was convicted of transporting teenage girls into the U.S. for the sex industry. Recently, the United Nations approved the first treaty to bolster international efforts to fight trafficking of women.

When 21-year-old Amneh Abdullah began gaining weight, her mother became suspicious. The young woman from Wadi Seer, Jordan, was dragged to see a doctor, who pronounced her six months pregnant. Hysterical, her mother told Amneh's 25-year-old brother, Fares. There were no words, no accusations - only bullets. "Her brother could not endure the shock, so he killed her," says Amneh's tearful mother, Shrouq. Fares, sentenced to one year in jail, was released at half term because his was a crime of passion. The Jordanian judiciary has repeatedly failed to abolish the law giving immunity to men who kill female family members for honour. Parliamentarians justified their defence of honour killings as protection of Jordan's traditional and moral values against western influences. Jordanian King Abdullah II, however, has pushed to rescind the law. In many Middle Eastern countries, perpetrators of honour killings are subject only to manslaughter charges and fined or sentenced to less than three years in jail.

Women who have sex outside of marriage, whether forced or willing, are the usual targets of honour killings. Some are killed for refusing to enter into an arranged marriage. An estimated 5,000 women worldwide are murdered by their own families. Countries with the most appalling records include Bangladesh and Pakistan, but the practice also exists in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, Brazil, Ecuador, India, Morocco, Turkey, Uganda, the United Kingdom - and even Canada. Amarpardeep Kaur Rai, 24, of Mississauga, Ont., was stabbed in the neck by her father after she refused to marry her cousin. Her father, 68-year-old Piara Singh Rai, was found guilty of attempted murder in June.
1. The sex trade industry and honour killing
2. Slavery, genital mutilation and abuse
3. Rape, female infanticide and the vote


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