Stop violence against women – It’s in our hands!
Amnesty International welcomes an Inaugural Human Rights Parliamentary Dinner in the Grand Hall of the Parliament Buildings on Tuesday 14 December which will highlight the issue of violence against women.
From the battlefield to the bedroom, women are at risk. Violence threatens women in multiple forms during conflict. Amnesty International’s latest report Lives blown apart lays out the global picture revealing a systematic pattern of abuse repeating itself in conflicts all over the world from Colombia, Iraq, Sudan, Chechnya, Nepal to Afghanistan and in 30 other ongoing conflicts.
Mr. Ced Simpson, Executive Director of Amnesty International New Zealand said: “But domestic violence is not something that happens over there. It happens here. It is not something that happens to other people, it happens to us, our friends and our families. In New Zealand, one woman is killed by her partner or ex-partner every five weeks. 50 % of all homicides of New Zealand women are committed by the woman’s partner or ex-partner.”
Figures show that 23,782 women and children accessed refuge services in 2003. Women’s Refuge – the umbrella organization of 50 Women’s Refuges around Aotearoa/ New Zealand and the only provider of services to battered women and children, receives 25% of their funds from Government but the remaining 75% of their funding they must raise from the community.
“Violence against women impoverishes society economically, politically and culturally. The direct economic costs of violence against women are enormous, in terms of lost working time, lost earnings and medical expenditure. The indirect costs of limiting the active role that women can take in the development of their community are unquantifiable.” said Ced Simpson.
Can anyone say how teh Women’s refuge organisation can verify to an independant auditor that they catually get the number of women accessing thier services as they claim? Also what exactly does accessing thier services mean anyhow? If I phone them up or write an e-mail asking for genreal information am I accessing thier service? Will I thereby be held up as part of a statistic to justify funding?
Also it strikes me as very strange to hear Refuge say our Socialist-Feminist government would only contribute 25% of the funding they claim to need. Hard to beleive such a femocentric government would leave the remaining 75% to be collected elsewhere in the community. One other point – the government uses money collected in the community to fund things like refuge – it’s called taxation. SO what’s the difference between trying to persuade the government to give you community derived money and trying to persuade the community to give you money directly themselves? Could it be that to do the latter your visible and accountable to the community itself in malls, shopping centres etc?
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Comment by zdrowe odchudzanie — Mon 21st September 2009 @ 12:03 am
Ced Simpson (and through staff) replied to me that the issue of discrimination against men was not an important enough issue in New Zealand, especially for limited resources. He was another with a set mind, not prepared to believe that our system in its bureaucratic ignorance of discrminatory practice against the hetrosexual male will be our biggest contributor to domestic violence.
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