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Health & Fitness

Hillary Clinton: Violence Against Women Is "Not Cultural, It's Criminal."

Hillary Clinton recently reminded the world that violence against women is "not cultural, it's criminal." Support Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, and others who render aid.

You know that cultural diversity mantra that people trot out to justify or rationalize any number of cultural horrors, horrors like circumcision for women, which can be done with a dirty, broken piece of glass, causing the little girl to bleed to death? Burying 16-year-old girls alive because they didn't marry the man their fathers told them to marry? Stoning women to death for "looking at" another man?

Hillary Clinton said that violence against women is "not cultural, it's wrong."

Amnesty International sent me Hillary's message, and I couldn't be more grateful. I don't believe in the mantra that cultures are not wrong, they're just different. I don't believe in cultural relativism.

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I support Amnesty International and I'm proud of the work they do.

Do you believe that rape is about sex and not, instead, about power and control? How about this story:

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"When Kavira in the Democratic Republic of Congo spoke out about being raped by a soldier, she was raped again and bayoneted in the stomach."

Was that an act about sex or power and control?

I don't know if Kavira survived, but I do know that many women emerging from the Congo are traumatized even without such violence. 

One Congolese woman I knew said her mother abandoned her when she was two years old because her father took a second wife. Luckily, the second wife was kind to the two-year-old, but I saw few signs of mothering and nurturing emerging from the grown-up two-year-old's childhood experiences, so I know she didn't get everything she needed to feel empathy for others. 

The father of her children had abandoned her or she threw him out, I can't remember which. He certainly wasn't present in their children's lives.

Remember the young woman whose brother aspired to a woman beyond his station in life in the mountains of Pakistan? The sister was publicly gang-raped by all the men in her village and paraded naked through her village to wipe out the shame of her brother's "offense" in loving a woman of higher caste. This is cultural tradition, and not just in Pakistan. Five of the six men accused of her rape are now free.

"When Rhaya in Indonesia was raped by her sister's husband and became pregnant from the attack, she was forced out of her home because staying would bring 'shame' to her village."

"When Bhanwari in India was raped by five men of a higher caste, her attackers were acquitted because the court said upper-caste men wouldn't rape a woman of lower caste."

Violence against women is "not cultural, it's criminal."

Give generously to Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres), or the charity of your choice. In a world full of darkness, we've all got to shine our own little light somewhere.

I know I can't give much, but I give what little I can.

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