F E A T U R E S

The Dreadful World of Women: Roll Call of Shame

BRIDE burning, feticide and rape besides other crimes against the fairer or weaker section as you wish to call women are too common place in India and other parts of the world. As each year governments and women's rights crusaders mark International Women's Day on March 8, spare a thought for the plight of women in impoverished developing countries. It is worst here, though women in the developed prosperous suffer equally.

Across Guatemala, women are demonstrating to seek the halt on the slaughter of women which has reached such levels that it has been named a "femicide."

The statistics tell a stark tale everywhere. women's rights are under threat, be it from sex trafficking, denial of education or job discrimination.

Figures compiled by several governments, development agencies and human rights groups present a roll call of shame when we have entered high tech 21st century.

* Two-thirds of the world's 800 million illiterate adults are women as girls are not seen as worth the investment, or are busy collecting water or firewood or doing other domestic chores.

* Two million girls aged from five to 15 join the commercial sex market every year.

* Domestic violence kills and injures more people in the developing world than war, cancer or traffic accidents.

* Seventy per cent of the world's poorest people are women.

* Violence against women causes more deaths and disabilities among women aged 15 to 44 than cancer, malaria, traffic accidents or war.

* Women produce half the world's food, but own less than two per cent of the land.

* Of the more than one billion people living in extreme poverty, 70 per cent are women.

* Almost a third of the world's women are homeless or live in inadequate housing.

* Half of all murdered women are killed by their current or former husbands or partners.

* Every minute a woman dies as a result of pregnancy complications.

* Women work two-thirds of the world's working hours, yet earn only a tenth of its income.

* One woman in three will be raped, beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused in her lifetime.

* 43 million girls are not able to go to school.

* Last year, one million HIV-positive women died of AIDS-related illnesses because they could not get the drugs they needed.

* Human Rights Watch, in reports on 15 countries including Afghanistan, Brazil, Morocco, Papua New Guinea, Togo and South Africa, has identified violence against schoolgirls, child domestic workers and those in conflict with the law as on the rise.

* Women across the developing world are the victims of systematic abuse.

Despite pledges at the landmark 1995 Beijing women's conference to boost the number of women in government, progress has been scant and slow. According to a report compiled by the international think tank, the Salzburg Seminar, only 13 out of 193 countries have 25 per cent or more women in government decision-making positions. In 1994, the percentage of women holding ministerial rank was 6.2 per cent. In 2005, the figure was 6.8 per cent - a rise of 0.6 per cent.

Are we doing enough to reverse this horrendous trend?

BACK

Canada: Whither Women Equality

IN one way Canada with its tolerance could celebrate how far the women have come in the struggle for gender equality. But the agenda is long and still unfinished. Despite a hard struggle of 40 years many things are yet to change.

The gains indeed may look impressive. Canada’s Governor General is a woman. So is the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and three more of the nine justices.  Women athletes score well on the world stage at the Olympics and other games. Any visit to the school games prove that young girls participate fully in the games. Same is true about academe where more than half of university students are now female. any score well  and  future looks brighter.

But in the controlling forums of politics and business, women are under-represented, underpaid and under-resourced. Sadly this situation may not change in the coming years.

Only 64 women sit in the House of Commons, barely one in five of its 308 members. That deprives a particular perspective of half the population when national issues are debated.  Same is the position in the provincial assemblies.

Federal Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion has plans to promote women candidates to run in selected ridings in the next federal election. And in a rare show of unity, Ontario's three main political leaders have agreed that more women must be elected to the Legislature in October 2007 election.

But Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative government has appallingly slashed funding to Status of Women Canada, the federal agency that promotes gender equality. He has also stopped funding women's groups that conduct research, advocate and lobby. He could not have done this if there were women in the House of Commons.

The Conservatives also abandoned the Liberal programme to give the provinces $5 billion over five years to create 100,000 new regulated spaces.  The new $100 a month grants to parents for each child under the age of 6 leads no where. Now one child in six under age 12 has access to regulated child care.

But the equality gap facing Canadian women is nowhere more evident than in the workplace. Women still make only 71 per cent of what men earn for full-time work. They seldom make it to the top. Women comprise just 12 per cent of the board members at Canada's 500 largest companies. This is highly developed part of our world indeed.

BACK

The age of rights
Ishtiaq Ahmed

THE present era is celebrated as the age of rights. Human rights are proclaimed as self-evident entitlements of all individuals to enjoy freedom, equality, dignity and security. Ideas of collective rights of voluntary groups such as trade unions also enjoy international recognition. In recent years even notions of group rights for cultural entities have been recognised as necessary to protect historically disadvantaged entities from being marginalised by mainstream majorities and the state. But what are rights?

Rights are claims or entitlements of individuals (citizens as well as denizens) and groups to negative and positive freedoms from the state, which ironically is expected to safeguard them in constitutional and legal terms and maintain procedures and institutions that guarantee avenues for protesting violation of rights.

Yet, violation of these three categories of rights by states and state agencies occur all the time. The UN system is premised on the sovereignty of the state, which rules out intervention within its domestic sphere under ordinary circumstances. In this regard, the rights of the very large category of asylum seekers who are to be found all over the world as well internally displaced persons constitute a special theme that needs to be probed further because there is considerable ambiguity as to who is entitled to be treated as a refugee and who is not.

However, some violations of rights by the state are of such a magnitude and intensity that they are described as crimes against humanity and result in ethnic cleansing and genocide, necessitating under international law action by the UN and its agencies.

Yet, despite several cases of massive human rights violations in the post-WW II era intervention within the domestic sphere of states is an exception rather than the rule. A permanent International Criminal Court (2002) has now been established, and the hope is that those guilty of crimes against humanity can be put on trial before it.

Additionally, there is considerable controversy as to whether rights should inhere only in individuals or if social groups can also be bearers of rights. One need not emphasise too strongly the fact that currently vast movements of people are taking place within the conventional borders of states, across them within larger regions and even beyond continents. As a result the traditional nation-state framework for organising society and disseminating shared values is becoming increasingly strained, thereby requiring new perspectives on establishing stability and communal harmony.

Notions of multiculturalism, assimilation, segregation or integration inform government policies on rights -- each such policy orientation entails implications for individuals and groups and results in different outcomes with regard to citizenship, gender equality and socioeconomic justice.

As far as the Third World in general and the Muslim world in particular is concerned, one can argue that the state must prioritise the protection of the individual and minorities from structural and cultural oppression. Therefore democracy in the Third World requires a strong state committed to an active policy of democratisation and promotion of egalitarian change. The formal description given to such a state is unimportant, but it must try to be secular and neutral in relation to the right to equal treatment of disparate groups constituting its permanent population.

Civil society in general, and civil-society actors such as NGOs committed to human rights, women's rights and group rights of minorities and indigenous peoples can play a very important role in augmenting the state's efforts, but they cannot replace it in bringing about the dissolution of rigidly-hierarchical social structures and cultural mores. This will be achieved only through the state and the democratic elements of civil society cooperating and coordinating their activities in favour of democracy.

While we in the Muslim world are debating as to whether democracy and human rights are compatible with Islam, elsewhere there is a growing consensus that without them being adopted and internalised both by the state and civil society's autocratic rule in some form is inevitable. I hear from my Marxist friends that they want an end to military rule and a restoration of democracy. This is indeed a very welcome development because neither Stalinism, nor Maoism, nor Trotskyism has been known to be particularly strong on democracy. But we are all now democrats and that is great news. It is, however, important to emphasise that democracy without human rights of individuals and cultural rights of minorities being safeguarded can only mean majority rule and majority decisions. This can easily become the tyranny of a brute majority.

Unfortunately Pakistani democracy has had the tendency of becoming majoritarian tyranny. Was it not the popularly-elected Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who used his parliamentary majority to have the Ahmadiyya community declared non-Muslims? Now, I am not saying that Sunnis and Shias must accept the claims of the Ahmadis that they are Muslims. Ironically, Ahmadis also do not consider those other than them proper Muslims Sir Muhammad Zafrulla Khan, a leading Ahmadi, did not participate in the funeral prayers of Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah, even when the latter had appointed him as Pakistan's foreign minister. So, I hold no brief for any sects accepting each other as good Muslims. It is quite all right for each sect to believe that it alone represents the true message of Islam but such a conviction should be kept out of politics. My point is that a democracy has no business to connect the religious beliefs of its citizens to their political rights.

On the other hand, until the mid-1960s the Catholic Church believed that all Protestants will burn in hell because they were heretics. Protestant doctrines had no less a damning position on Catholics. But after 1945 the discrimination of citizens on the basis of their religious beliefs was rejected by almost all democracies in the west and all bona fide citizens were accorded the same rights.

Sooner or later we will arrive at the same conclusion that a state based on the rule of law, an open and transparent process of decision-making and one that treats all individuals with respect irrespective of their caste, creed, colour and gender is in the best interests of all citizens. Terrorism, cruelty, discrimination, religious and sectarian persecution, economic exploitation and social oppression not only inflict pain and humiliation on the victims but also kill the humanity of the oppressors and exploiters. One cannot deny the humanity of others without demeaning one's own. The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau most aptly declared that a nation which enslaves another is not free itself.

[Courtesy Ishtiaq Ahmed, professor of political science at the University of Stockholm, Sweden. Email: Ishtiaq.Ahmed@statsvet.su.se and The News  of Jang group, Pakistan http://thenews.jang.com.pk/arc_news.asp?id=9]

BACK

Insurance Companies and You
Amrit Chahal

Insurance in the west is big multi billion dollar business. It is emerging at the same level in the developing world. From life to health to houses, to businesses and travel and what not, all insured.  Perhaps even marriages and social relations too would be one day insured by the corporations. Amrit Chahal, a young scholar from Virginia, USA tells us some inside story how health insurance works more for the benefit of the corporations.

Insurance companies have a fixed cost ratio that they put into affect with physicians and hospitals. Private practices have a client base which is suppose to be composed of any one who would enter the office and seek care. In reality, physicians only accept patients who have the same insurance they carry. This in turn can result in physicians being overly selective and in the case of a specialist, not providing care to a patient who is need. The physicians practice could eventually become composed of a majority of one type of insurance carrier; the practice could eventually go into bankruptcy when the fixed cost ratio does not cover the overhead that the practice generates. Insurance companies have a plan for this type of situation; they either encourage the doctor to cut down on ‘unnecessary’ testing or require the patient to pay a small sum each visit no matter what the gravity of the visit is. Insurance companies also pay physicians as a reward for not ordering expensive tests or requiring hospital stays.

Parallel to this, insurance companies have gone under the radar for anti trust. Many insurance companies have created a large conglomerate in which the area for competition in the insurance industry has been cut dramatically. This causes the market to be one sided and the companies with large shares to charge premiums which they think are appropriate, whether it is in the best interest of the patient or not.  A new bill that is being proposed by the senate will make sure insurance companies abide by the same laws that have been set forth for every industry in America to prevent anti trust. Senator Patrick Leahy is heading the bill, he states that “Insurers may object to being subject to the same antitrust laws as everyone else, but if they are operating in an honest and appropriate way, they should have nothing to fear…” I completely agree with this statement, it is time for insurance companies to come under the same periscope that every other company in America is under.

Personally, I have experienced more than my share of being the back seat patient, statistically there are many more people like myself who have been victims of large insurance conglomerates trying to make a profit. . “The Institute of Medicine (IOM) report on medical errors created an intense public response by stating that between 44,000 and 98,000 hospitalized Americans die each year as a result of preventable medical errors”(Sox, Woloshin). " Some of these deaths are caused by simple misdiagnoses in the emergency room of a hospital while others are caused by weeks and months of physicians not treating there patients with the total amount of care that they deserve to receive. The insurance companies of today have a noose around the neck of every private practice in the country.

Recent data shows that insurance companies are being sued the most out of any other industry in the United States. Most claims are filed as negligence or mal practice. About 1700 law suits are filed annually against insurance companies, which is five times higher than the energy segment of the nation who face about 364 law suits annually (Green). The average insurer will spend about 36 million in legal fees per year (Green). On a national scale the total amount of legal fees that the American insurance company will spend in the American civil justice system is approximately 246 billion (Green), which will constitute about 2.2% of our gross domestic product per year.

I believe that ethics needs to be a larger part of creating a doctor. As of now they only take the mandatory ethics courses in college and agree to the Hippocratic Oath. If ethics were stressed more in the classroom and in the field of work for a physician, better decisions would be made for patients down the road. This is only if there are physicians out there who are willing to go the extra mile and hand down there values to a generation of doctors who will carry healthcare into the future. Changes must be made to help our nation receive better health care. The perpetual motion the insurance companies have in gaining the upper hand in the insurance segment of the American industry will become stellar if the American government and American people do not do more to question the practices of insurance companies. After all, it is our health and our futures at stake.

References Cited

Leahy, Patrick J... "SEN. Leahy Leads Bipartisan Effort to Hold Insurance Companies Accountable Under Antitrust Laws." US FED News Service 02/15/2007 02/19/2007 <http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1217198331&sid=1&Fmt=
3&clientId=18133&RQT=309&VName=PQD>.

Flanagan, Jerry . "Insurance Companies, Drug Companies Cloak themselves in a Coalitions to Push Proposals That Increase Profitability." US FED News Service 01/18/2007 02/19/2007 < http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1196773581&sid=
1&Fmt=3&clientId=18133&RQT=309&VName=PQD>.

Green, Meg. "Study: Insurers Facing More Lawsuits Than Any Other Sector." Best's Review 10701/2007 74. 02/19/2007 <http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1200704811&sid=1&Fmt
=3&clientId=18133&RQT=309&VName=PQD>.

Sox, Harold C., Woloshin, Steven. “How Many Deaths Are Due to Medical Error? Getting the Number Right.” Effective Clinical Practice 11/2000 01/25/2007

http://www.acponline.org/journals/ecp/novdec00/sox.htm.

BACK