As the Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s final year in office
is drawing to a close, he is making it a priority to enforce a law that
protects women from forced childhood marriage and domestic violence. The new law makes it a crime to force young
girls to marry and also protects them from the high likelihood of future
domestic violence. A report on domestic
violence reported that at least 85% of women had experienced some form of
abuse. Why has violence against women in
Afghanistan reached this high a percentage? Why are women experiencing all of this
abuse? These women have neither been
protected from this violence nor have they been given the same rights that men
possess, that is, until recently. Why has it taken this long for Afghanistan to
realize that their women and children deserve the same rights as men? Young girls are forced to marry older men and
often have children beginning in their teens.
This leads to medical problems for not only themselves, but also for
their children. This pattern of
childhood marriage and domestic violence is robbing women and children of basic
human rights. If they had no protection
under the law, how long would they have to wait before their suffering was
recognized? Other nations that have
similar levels of domestic violence against women and children should follow
the example of Afghanistan and start to offer aid to the victims. I never realized that the statistics
involving domestic violence in other countries had reached such high
volumes. This article made me more aware
of the some of the problems that children and adults face every day in not only
Afghanistan, but all around the world.
These people have not been receiving their basic human rights, so it is
hopeful to see that some countries are making an effort to provide legal
protection for these individuals.
This is the class blog for Eng 1102 at GA Tech called "Fiction, Human Rights, and Social Responsibility." The purpose of this blog is to extend our discussion beyond the classroom and to become aware of human rights issues that exist in the world today and how technology has played a role in either solving or aggravating them. Blogs will be a paragraph long (250 words) and students will contribute once every three weeks according to class number. Entries must be posted by Friday midnight.
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This is interesting and it is a sad fact that there have been many studies that show that an increase in violence in a country by a government reflects an increase in domestic violence of people living in that country, especially targeted at women. These studies suggest that families take the frustration of living under violent rule out on their families because they have nowhere else to express themselves. IT is very sad, but I am glad to see there are efforts to stop this
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