Global Situation of Women and Impacts on Women in Burma
By M Rojanabenjawong
In most societies in the world, women are often viewed as an inferior group of people.
They have been successively oppressed, abused and tortured both in their countries and along their countries’ borders. Situations are worse if those women are members of ethnic minorities as they have to face gender inequality as well as racial ones. Despite efforts from the international community to improve this issue, the problem still persists and a more effective approach is needed to deal with it.
According to the United Nations World Survey on the Role of Women in Development published in 2006, women nowadays are still encountering economic, social and political difficulties in their home countries.1 First, their economic problems often range from unequal payment rates to unequal job opportunities. It has been reported that women face economic hardship because the majority of jobs available in their countries pay women less than men even though they are in the same positions.2 Women in the USA only earn around 60 to 90 per cent of what men earn in the same jobs, for example, 427 American men who work as financial managers are paid 1,397,000 weekly while 535 female in the same positions are paid only 839,000 weekly in 2004.3 Moreover, women make up a majority of the America’s unemployment rate. According to the US Department of Labor, employed American men aged 16 and above from April 2006 to April 2007 outnumbered employed American women in the same age range by approximately 10.5 million people.4 This happened because women are believed to have less capacity than men and they should be assigned to work mostly in households. In short, employment in most countries is still subjected to gender stereotypes.
In most societies, women have been encountering unequal access to resources, education and political participation. UNICEF’s State of the World Children report 2007 shows that more girls in developing countries miss out on secondary education than boys.5 For instance, around 25 per cent of Afghan boys of official secondary school age were enrolled in secondary schools from 1996-2006 while only 5 per cent of the girls were. Women, who do not have decision-making power in the household, have been reported to be unnourished themselves because their access to resources has been limited, in some cases to the dgree that they could not eat what they wanted if their husbands do not agree or allow them. In 2006 unequal access to resources contributed to 40 to 60 per cent of South African women being considered underweight.
Although women’s political participants have increased, in 2005 only16 per cent of political representation worldwide was female according to IDeA, an organisation that works for local government imporvement.6 This is because of social and economic regimes, as well as political structures do not sufficiently encourage female representation.
These problems go around in a circle and they are global issues since they affect all countries. In order to solve these problems, the economic and socio-political situations of women have to be improved by changing global stereotypes about women. These stereotypes are evident, especially in Asia, where people have strong beliefs in unequal roles and capacities between men and women.
Women in Asia
Like other parts of the world, Asian women have experienced human rights abuses in their home countries. Human Rights Watch states in its reports that violence against women occurs mainly because males, who have the majority of power in Asian societies, perceive females as lower in social status and partly because of the women’s ethnicity, religion, age, class, sexual orientation and national origins.7 Violence and other forms of economic, social and political discrimination are often disguised in Asian traditional values where patriarchal systems are predominant.
Economically, women are often recruited into service jobs such as food preparation workers or cleaners, where they are often paid below minimum wage and forced to work overtime in poor and dangerous working conditions. Female migrant workers in Sri Lanka, the Middle East, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Singapore often work 16 to 18 hours a day, seven days a week in crowded factories with irregular or no payment. Further compounding their situation is the fact that they are exempt from domestic labour laws in those countries, and consequently are open to exploitation and have no avenue for redress. Since they are not protected by any law, sexual abuses often come with these economic discriminations.
...there is no real attempt to alter stereotypes about women as being inferior...
Moreover, it is difficult for Asian women to fully express their social rights since privileges and opportunities in society are often given to males. Women usually face inadequate access to education and health care. South Asian women’s literacy rates remain low, for example there are approximately 64 literate women for every 100 literate men in Pakistan and 86 per cent of Afghan women are illiterate. Most women in rural areas have little or no access to basic health care services and Asian governments also fail to ensure that reproductive and sexual health care is safe and accessible. Often women are not informed about safe sexual practices or contraceptive methods, at the request of their male family members. If sexual abuses such as a marital rape occur, governments fail to criminalize perpetrators and women are not encouraged to report such incidents to authorities. As a result, women’s rate of HIV infection, particularly in Cambodia, Burma, Thailand and India are rising and a contributing factor is sexual violence and forced marriages that many women and girls have to encounter as part of their cultures.8
In terms of politics, women’s activism has also been limited by governments. Even though some countries have granted special national and local representative quotas for women, they are poorly supported because their public engagement is seen as inappropriate and their ability is doubted due to those stereotypes about women. In Pakistan and Afghanistan, national and local female representatives in the government or social projects often come across discrimination, violence, harassment and even death threats when they try to run campaigns on women’s literacy and sexual and domestic violence.9
Due to these discriminations and oppressions against women, the international community has introduced some initiatives to solve and prevent them. One such initiative is the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women, which has been ratified by many countries across Asia. Consequently these countries are obligated to work towards eradicating discrimination against women.10 However, the governments of most Asian countries have failed to comply with the relevant conventions because all the governments are male-dominant and they are not the people who suffer from oppressions. Thus, they lack of genuine political will to raise awareness of this issue. The United Nations cannot force a country to comply nor can they punish a country that fails to fully abide by the convention.
More importantly, there is no real attempt to alter stereotypes about women as being an inferior group of people. Burma is an example of a patriarchal society in Asian where women’s rights are systematically violated and this behaviour comes from the basic idea that women are inferior.
Women in Burma and their situation
Under the military regime all people have encountered many forms of oppression; women in Burma face double discrimination from the Burmese military regime. There is a Burmese saying, which states that “women are lower than dogs”. This saying developed from Burmese men’s interpretations of Buddha’s teachings in which, according to this interpretations, in past lives men had done more meritorious deeds and as a result women are perceived as inferior.11 Those misbeliefs allow men to be given advantages to control over women’s aspects of life and most women fall behind men in education, employment and political opportunities.
Moreover, ongoing confrontations between the military junta and the civilians particularly since 1988 have worsened the overall situation in Burma. While men in Burma have been forcibly recruited into the army, forced to work on labour intensive projects and other forms of oppression, women have to face the same things as well as additional violence based on their gender. The oppression that ethnic women face is worse than the general female population in Burma because of the military campaigns that the Burmese junta conducts against ethnic minorities in the country. Women in ethnic communities are generally the last people to leave their villages as men often flee earlier to avoid forced labour quotas, portering duties or to fight, consequently the remaining women have to deal with demands from the Burmese army and are often the first point of contact for soldiers. As a result they are vulnerable to human rights abuses, such as forced labour, torture, portering, but they are also vulnerable genders specific violations, such as rape, forced marriage and resulting unwanted pregnancy. According to the Karen Women’s Organization (KWO) ethnic women are also forced to act human minesweepers and pregnant women have had miscarriages while performing portering and forced labour duties, which involve carrying heavy loads, for the Burmese army. More than 10,800 Karen women were reported to be abused by the Burmese army battalions, according to the May 2006 letter to the UN General Secretary.
Despite the ongoing violations of women’s rights in Burma, there are some efforts to rectify the situation. These efforts generally involve awareness raising such as making videos about issues facing female Karen refugees for example “CEASE! FIRE! more broken promises, more broken lives” by Kaw Lah Films, to holding international conferences related to the situation of ethnic women, which are attended by representatives from Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Laos, China and the Philippines, as well as other Western countries, for example, the “Impact of Globalization, Regionalism and Nationalism on Minority Peoples in Southeast Asia” conference was held in November 2004. The KWO is also running the “Women’s Protection Program” that involves awareness-raising activities among young Karen women to prevent violence against them and increase support of women’s protection issues in the Karen refugee camps.12
Furthermore, the cooperation between non-governmental organisations and other democratic countries is seen as a positive movement towards genuine achievement of human rights in Burma and it is one of the possible means, apart from awareness-raising activities, to partly reduce oppression from the Burmese military against women. However China and Russia’s vetoes against the US and the UK sponsored resolution on Burma was a failure of the international community to improve women’s rights under the overall human rights scheme for the country. More effective ways to deal with this issue of women’s rights have to be approached and the international community has to appeal to China and Russia to see the priority of human rights, and women’s rights, rather than their economic and military relations with the Burmese junta.
It is necessary that further campaigns on women’s rights should not only present how Burmese women suffer, but they should also promote women’s equality. People have to start believing that women have the same capacity as men and they have equal rights to make their own choices of jobs, social and political participation. From the past, female figures in the international arena such as Margaret Thatcher, Mother Teresa and even Aung San Suu Kyi have proven that women could be qualified politicians or social activists. The change of stereotypes about women together with genuine will to improve overall human rights situation in Burma are crucial. If they are continuously and effectively generated, women will suffer less.
Footnotes:
DESA, “2004 World Survey on the Role of Women in Development”, 2006
Global Issues, “Women’s Rights”, February 2007
U.S. Department of Labor, “Median usual weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary workers by detailed occupation and sex, 2004 annual averages”, 2004
U.S. Department of Labor, “Employment status of the civilian noninstitutional population by sex and age, seasonally adjusted”, April 2007
UNICEF, “The State of the World Children report 2007", 2006
International Institute of Democracy and Electoral Assistance, “Women in Polit
ics”, March 2007
Human Rights Watch, “Women’s Rights in Asia”, 2006 8 Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children, November 2004
“Women’s Rights in Asia”, 2006
EarthRights International, “The Situation of Women in Burma”, February 2006
Irrawaddy, “Karen Women Victimized by Rights Abuses, Says New Report”, February 2007
Ibid
To go to the other articles published in the March 2007 BI Newsletter click on the links below:
...there is no real attempt to alter stereotypes about women as being inferior...
