The 60th Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) at the UN ended last week. After letting the dust settle there are two stories I will never forget.
In the first week of CSW, I went to a meeting only to find out the panelists never showed up. A woman seized the opportunity to talk about her work with human trafficking. You think you have heard everything and then you find out that is far from true. She told us a story of a 40-year-old woman who was rescued from being trafficked for torture. People paid money to torture her in multiple ways. There were little boys and young girls who were being trafficked for torture with her, but as of now they are still unable to locate them.
In the second week I was attending mass when the priest mentioned that four nuns were killed in Yemen. They were working in an old person’s home, when they were taken, tied to a tree, and then shot in the head. Now I had been to meetings at the UN about gender violence and all sorts of topics related to women for the last few weeks and this terrible crime was never mentioned.
This year at the CSW there seemed to be a focus on advancing women in leadership positions in the United Nations, specifically in the position of the Secretary General. While I am all for women having leadership roles, I cannot stop myself from asking is that the most urgent priority? There are women out there in the world who are being treated barbarically, who are being killed, it seems ending such barbarism should be the bigger priority.
At one point when gender based violence was being addressed, the solution that received the most attention was reproductive rights. For a moment let’s put aside the question of whether or not abortion or contraception is morally okay. Let’s simply look at gender based violence. Reproductive rights would not have helped that woman from being tortured or those nuns from being murdered. Here was a great opportunity to address gender-based violence on a deeper, causal level and it was missed.
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