[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 29 (Tuesday, March 17, 1998)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E392-E393]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


IN OPPOSITION TO VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN--MARKING INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S 
                                  DAY

                                 ______
                                 

                            HON. TOM LANTOS

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                        Tuesday, March 17, 1998

  Mr. LANTOS. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to express my abhorrence to all 
forms of violence against women and to speak out in support of 
International Women's Day. With many of our colleagues here in this 
body, I have worked to foster respect for civil rights here at home and 
human rights abroad.
  In connection with the celebration of International Women's Day, Mr. 
Speaker, I want to call to the attention of my colleagues those justice 
seekers who are beginning to expose the roots of injustice, who are 
bringing to our attention human beings denied their uniqueness and 
their personhood. Our task as advocates for human rights is not only to 
continue the pursuit of justice, but also to realize that as we make 
progress, we must release ourselves from ignorance and biases that 
allow us to overlook some atrocities but not others. In this regard, 
Mr. Speaker, we must affirm that the rights of women are the rights of 
all individuals. I add my voice to that of the United Nations' World 
Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, 1993, which proclaims, ``Women's 
rights are human rights.''
  Unfortunately, Mr. Speaker, women face a triple threat to their human 
rights. They are victimized by the construction of gender in their 
society. They are victimized by gender-based violence. And they are 
discriminated against by the structures of justice. Today, we must take 
action by properly addressing human rights violations against women. We 
must recognize gender-based violence in its various forms, and we must 
recognize these violent acts as human rights violations including, 
among others, sexual trafficking, economic discrimination, female 
genital mutilation, domestic violence, and rape.
  These crimes against humanity are compounded by many victims' 
justifiable fear that their suffering will be disclaimed, that their 
suffering will be thrown out as invalid. Human rights violations 
against women are under-reported and under-emphasized. We must be 
certain, Mr. Speaker, that violence against women is no longer 
silenced.
  One of the most repugnant ways in which gender-based constructs 
discriminate against women, Mr. Speaker, is the trafficking of women 
and girls. They are reduced to mere economic sexual value to be sold 
and bartered. In the disturbing realm of sexual trafficking, women are 
forced into prostitution and coerced into marriage; they are often sold 
into bondage, where they are tortured and face degrading treatment as 
well as sexually transmitted diseases. Trafficking in women occurs 
across some well-patrolled international borders, and it is no 
coincidence that in many countries the institutions of justice, 
including the police, condone and profit from the trade in women.
  In Thailand, there is a flourishing trade in Burmese women and girls; 
in India, the same trafficking occurs with Nepali women and girls. 
Bangladeshi women are lured to Pakistan by promises of a better life or 
abducted from their homes; they are then sold in clandestine settings 
to brothels were pimps threaten them with their illegal immigrant 
status and then denounce them for having sex outside of marriage.

  Mr. Speaker, women are often subjected to gender-based economic 
discrimination and degradation because some states fail to recognize 
them as individuals outside of their material value. Economic 
discrimination against women makes them particularly vulnerable to 
harassment and abuse. Women are now increasingly important to the 
economies of most countries, but at the same time, many countries 
neglect women's rights as laborers. Women in the workplace are 
exploited and abused in a number of ways relating specifically to their 
sex.
  As the majority of workers in the Maquiladoras, the export-processing 
factories along the U.S.-Mexico border, women must engage in a gender-
specific fight to gain equal protection in the labor market. Most women 
who work in Maquiladoras do so because they are less well-educated and 
lack opportunities to gain necessary qualifications for other jobs. As 
a condition of employment, women applicants are routinely required to 
give urine samples for pregnancy tests. If a worker becomes pregnant 
and this is discovered by her boss, she is frequently forced to resign. 
Female workers may be harassed and mistreated, given more physically 
difficult tasks, and often forced to stand while working.
  Furthermore, when a Mexican woman is a victim of sex discrimination, 
she has few avenues of legal redress. The Mexican justice system fails 
to protect women's reproductive health. The economic disincentive of 
regulating the manufacturing sector, which is the excuse given for 
failing to take action to protect women, is a poor excuse for failing 
to act.
  Sexual discrimination in the workplace is reinforced by the lack of 
economic opportunity for women in many countries. Fear of losing a job 
reinforces a woman's inability to seek redress of her grievances. These 
acts of abuse are intolerable as women are forced into an outrageous 
choice between their legitimate human rights and their jobs.
  In time of war or periods of social unrest, Mr. Speaker, violence 
toward women is intensified. As a Co-Chair of the Congressional Human 
Rights Caucus, I stepped forward with the horrifying story of the 
treatment of women

[[Page E393]]

and children in Uganda during the recent conflict there. Girls and 
women in Uganda are traded back and forth, bartered as wives. Their 
allocation is part of a dehumanizing reward system for male soldiers. 
This crime addresses a theme of ownership which precludes women's 
sexual rights and brings to light the brutalization of Ugandan women. 
Rape within ``marriage'' is not construed as a crime in Uganda, or for 
that matter, in many countries which consistently violate women's 
rights. When intra-marriage rape is condoned within a society, this 
neglect is one of several factors leading to a normalization of 
domestic violence.
  Sexual discrimination and power are especially apparent in Uganda as 
girls who are forcibly married are required to cook for the soldiers as 
they are on the move and are severely beaten or killed should they not 
cook quickly enough. Both girls and boys are forced to kill other 
children who have not performed their tasks to a sufficient level. 
Captive boys are often forced to sleep with captive girls, and this 
sexual indoctrination has terrible ramifications for future sexual 
violence. The nightmare in Uganda demonstrates the importance of taking 
into account the sexual specificity of violence. We should recognize 
how sexual violence harms both girls and boys, women and men.

  Mr. Speaker, one of the most horrible examples of gender-based 
violence against women and children is female genital mutilation (FGM). 
FGM refers to either the removal of certain parts of the female 
genitalia or all of it. FGM is a crime against humanity--it violates a 
woman's fundamental right to a healthy life. Nearly 135 million girls 
and women around the world have undergone FGM, and it continues at an 
astounding rate of approximately 6,000 incidents per day. It is 
practiced extensively in Africa, in the Middle East, and among many 
immigrant communities in parts of Asia and the Pacific.
  FGM is an extremely painful and even dangerous procedure which scars 
women both physically and mentally for life. FGM is an example of how 
violence is connected to gender determination as a woman is often 
considered ``incomplete'' lest she undergo FGM. A woman is not treated 
as a specific individual, rather she is a sexual being whose sexuality, 
sexual appetite, and reproductive functions are supposedly controlled 
and limited through FGM. In the case of FGM, we are forced to deal with 
brutal cultural discrimination against women. Women who have undergone 
FGM have publicly come forward to present their stories of humiliation 
and pain.
  Crimes specific to women, Mr. Speaker, often revolve around religious 
and cultural justifications that seem inevitable to discriminate 
against the female gender rather than the male. In Afghanistan, which 
has endured 18 years of armed conflict, we are witnessing a tragic 
situation in which thousands of women are literally prohibited from 
leaving their homes. They must be ``invisible;'' they are denied their 
humanity. Women are forced to wear a robe which completely covers their 
bodies, the burqa robe. Should women expose their ankles, they are 
accused of violating the Taliban, the interpretation of the Shari's 
(Islamic law) based upon the teaching of Islamic schools in Pakistan. 
The restrictions upon Afghani women are a shocking violation of human 
rights based upon culturally determined ideas of gender.
  Mr. Speaker, we must not become desensitized to violence against 
women. It is the responsibility of every state to preserve the human 
rights of women and to protect them against violence. Violence against 
women is not a private matter. In far too many countries--
unfortunately, including our own--it is a structural and system-wide 
violation of human rights of women. States that do not prevent and 
punish crimes of domestic violence are as guilty as the perpetrators of 
that violence. Inaction against domestic violence reinforces the denial 
of basic human rights.
  Domestic or family violence is a commonplace occurrence in nearly 
every country in the world, and battered women are isolated from 
national systems of justice, as well as from community and family. 
Intimate partners are prosecuted less harshly than those who victimize 
strangers, and this pattern of neglect for women's rights is evident in 
many corners of the world. In Brazil, some courts still exonerate men 
accused of domestic violence if they acted ``to defend their honor.'' 
South African justice officers do not wish to be involved in domestic 
violence; they consider it a ``private'' affair. Not only are women 
subjected to acts of violence, but they are also subjected to judicial 
establishments which systematically are involved in gender-specific 
violation of human rights.

  Mr. Speaker, the harmful perceptions of domestic violence are 
magnified in the case of rape. Rape is widely portrayed as an 
individual act and a private crime of honor, not as the political use 
of violence. Since World War II, however, human rights organizations 
estimate that there have been one million women raped during wars. Rape 
in war has been obscured from public view by our assumptions about the 
hyper masculine nature of soldiering and of rape as a crime of sex 
rather than a crime of violence.
  This past week, Dragoljub Kunarac, a former Bosnian Serb paramilitary 
commander, confessed that he had raped Muslim women in an international 
legal process before the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague. He 
is the first individual to plead guilty to rape as a war crime. The 
Hague is the first court of its kind to specifically list rape and 
other sexual offenses as war crimes. The international women's movement 
has seldom been so effective in alerting the world to crimes against 
women as it has been in calling to international attention the brutal 
use of rape during the armed conflict in Bosnia.
  Rape is an especially under-reported and minimized assault on women. 
It is ``the least condemned war crime; throughout history, the rape of 
hundreds of thousands of women and children in all regions of the world 
has been a bitter reality,'' according to the UN Special Rapporteur of 
Violence Against Women. We must not cease our efforts to identify 
gender-specific violence against women in such situations.
  Rape has been used to brutalize, to dehumanize, and to humiliate 
civilian populations on ethnic, national, political, and religious 
grounds. Sexual violence was defined by many analysts as a genocidal 
act in the Yugoslavian conflict because it was perpetrated primarily by 
Bosnian-Serbs as a weapon in their effort to drive out the Muslim 
population. Some Muslims were told while being raped that they would 
bear Serbian children.
  During the 1994 genocide in Africa, Hutu militia in Rawanda subjected 
the Tutsi minority women to gender-based violence on a mass scale as 
they raped and sexually assaulted hundreds of thousands of women. In 
another instance of human rights violation, Pakistani soldiers 
committed ethnically-motivated mass rapes during the Bangladesh war for 
independence.
  It is an outrage that rape is still categorized by many as a crime of 
honor and property as opposed to a crime against personal physical 
integrity. This misconception adds to the false notion that rape is a 
``lesser'' crime in comparison to torture. Women are denied their 
individual humanity and instead perceived by the aggressor as a symbol 
of the enemy community that can be humiliated, violated, and 
eradicated.
  This year we will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Universal 
Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), but we should not overlook the fact 
that the human rights of women were not specifically affirmed by the 
United Nations until 1993. Before this time, the gender-specific nature 
of many of the crimes against women were often ignored.
  By recognizing that violence is often specific to gender and by 
acknowledging the ways in which violence relates to our conceptions of 
gender, we can illuminate the barriers that we must transcend to 
achieve equal rights for women. The pervasive forms of violence that 
are normalized and trivialized by culture and society must not be 
tolerated as we affirm the human rights of women on this International 
Day of Women.
  Mr. Speaker, the rights of all humans are unalienable rights. We must 
stand firm in our belief that all--women, as well as men--have an 
individual right to dignity and that our own rights are not assured 
unless the human rights of all others on this planet are secure. I urge 
my colleagues to join me in this fight for human rights for all women.
  I commend to my colleagues the words of Pastor Martin Niemoeller, who 
endured the horrors of Nazi Germany: ``In Germany they came first for 
the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. 
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a 
Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up 
because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, 
and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for 
me, and by that time no one was left to speak up.''
  Mr. Speaker, the violation of the human rights of any woman is the 
violation of the rights of all of us. As we mark International Women's 
Day, we must recommit overselves to that struggle.

                          ____________________