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Harvard World Health News
Dec. 7th, 2005 07:30 amHighlights from the Harvard World Health News:
Domestic Violence: a Global Health Crisis
(World Health Organization)
Excerpted from the foreword of the Summary Report.
Foreword by Joy Phumaphi, Assistant Director-General, Family and Community Health, WHO
(November 2005) -- Each culture has its sayings and songs about the importance of home, and the comfort and security to be found there. Yet for many women, home is a place of pain and humiliation.
As this report clearly shows, violence against women by their male partners is common, wide-spread and far-reaching in its impact. For too long hidden behind closed doors and avoided in public discourse, such violence can no longer be denied as part of everyday life for millions of women.
The research findings presented in this report reinforce the key messages of WHO's World Report on Violence and Health in 2002, challenging notions that acts of violence are simply matters of family privacy, individual choice, or inevitable facts of life. The data collected by WHO and researchers in 10 countries confirm our understanding that violence against women is an important social problem. Violence against women is also an important risk factor for women's ill-health, and should receive greater attention.
Experience, primarily in industrialized countries, has shown that public health approaches to violence can make a difference. The health sector has unique potential to deal with violence against women, particularly through reproductive health services, which most women will access at some point in their lives. The Study indicates, however, that this potential is far from being realized. This is partly because stigma and fear make many women reluctant to disclose their suffering. But it is also because few doctors, nurses or other health personnel have the awareness and the training to identify violence as the underlying cause of women's health problems, or can provide help, particularly in settings where other services for follow-up care or protection are not available. The health sector can certainly not do this alone, but it should increasingly fulfill its potential to take a proactive role in violence prevention.
Violence against women is both a consequence and a cause of gender inequality. Primary prevention programmes that address gender inequality and tackle the many root causes of violence, changes in legislation, and the provision of services for women living with violence are all essential. The Millennium Development Goal regarding girls' education, gender equality and the empowerment of women reflects the international community's recognition that health, development, and gender equality issues are closely interconnected.
WHO regards the prevention of violence in general -- and violence against women in particular -- a high priority. It offers technical expertise to countries wishing to work against violence, and urges international donors to support such work. It continues to emphasize the importance of action-oriented, ethically based research, such as this Study, to increase our understanding of the problem and what to do about it. It also strongly urges the health sector to take a more proactive role in responding to the needs of the many women living in violent relationships.
Summary Report, full text (pdf)
WHO Multi-Country Study on Women's Health and Domestic Violence Against Women
Women in a dangerous world
No place for your daughters
Nov 24th 2005, The Economist
Counting the victims
TUNING in round the clock, via satellite or internet blog, to any bout of mayhem anywhere, you might not think the world was becoming a more peaceable place. But in some ways it is, and measurably so. A recent Human Security Report released by the Liu Institute at the University of British Columbia registers a 40% drop in the number of armed conflicts between 1992 and 2003, with the worst wars, those claiming more than a thousand lives in battle, down by 80%. While 28 armed struggles for self-determination ignited or reignited between 1991 and 2004, an encouraging 43 others were contained or doused.
Yet measured in a different way, from the point of view of the half of the world's population that is female, argues the Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of the Armed Forces, the world is an awfully violent place, and not just in its war zones. Men still fill most of the bodybags in wartime, including in civil wars, even on DCAF's figures, but their sisters, mothers, wives and daughters, it argues in a new report entitled “Women in an Insecure World”, face nothing short of a “hidden gendercide”.
( Read More )
AIDS: The Strategy Is Wrong
By Richard Holbrooke, washingtonpost.com, Tuesday, November 29, 2005
Thursday is the 18th annual World AIDS Day, a time for countless statements of concern and commitment from world leaders, thousands of commemorations and remembrances, and reams of statistics. One important article has already appeared on this page, by Jim Yong Kim, the highly respected director of the HIV-AIDS Department of the World Health Organization [Nov. 23]. After recounting the grim statistics -- 3 million deaths in the past year alone, 5 million new infections this year, rising infection rates in nearly every part of the world and an admission that "good news is hard to find in the new U.N. report" -- Kim wrote that he was nonetheless "optimistic that the epidemic can be stopped."
I respect Kim and admire his commitment, as well as that of every foot soldier in this war. I share that commitment. With respect, then, to my friends and colleagues in the field -- most far more qualified than I am -- I must nonetheless mark World AIDS Day with a word of pessimism that they will not necessarily welcome. We have to face the truth: We are not winning the war on AIDS, and our current strategies are not working. Every year since the first World AIDS Day, the number of people affected has increased. The very best that can be said is that we are losing at a slightly slower rate.
( Read More )
Domestic Violence: a Global Health Crisis
(World Health Organization)
Excerpted from the foreword of the Summary Report.
Foreword by Joy Phumaphi, Assistant Director-General, Family and Community Health, WHO
(November 2005) -- Each culture has its sayings and songs about the importance of home, and the comfort and security to be found there. Yet for many women, home is a place of pain and humiliation.
As this report clearly shows, violence against women by their male partners is common, wide-spread and far-reaching in its impact. For too long hidden behind closed doors and avoided in public discourse, such violence can no longer be denied as part of everyday life for millions of women.
The research findings presented in this report reinforce the key messages of WHO's World Report on Violence and Health in 2002, challenging notions that acts of violence are simply matters of family privacy, individual choice, or inevitable facts of life. The data collected by WHO and researchers in 10 countries confirm our understanding that violence against women is an important social problem. Violence against women is also an important risk factor for women's ill-health, and should receive greater attention.
Experience, primarily in industrialized countries, has shown that public health approaches to violence can make a difference. The health sector has unique potential to deal with violence against women, particularly through reproductive health services, which most women will access at some point in their lives. The Study indicates, however, that this potential is far from being realized. This is partly because stigma and fear make many women reluctant to disclose their suffering. But it is also because few doctors, nurses or other health personnel have the awareness and the training to identify violence as the underlying cause of women's health problems, or can provide help, particularly in settings where other services for follow-up care or protection are not available. The health sector can certainly not do this alone, but it should increasingly fulfill its potential to take a proactive role in violence prevention.
Violence against women is both a consequence and a cause of gender inequality. Primary prevention programmes that address gender inequality and tackle the many root causes of violence, changes in legislation, and the provision of services for women living with violence are all essential. The Millennium Development Goal regarding girls' education, gender equality and the empowerment of women reflects the international community's recognition that health, development, and gender equality issues are closely interconnected.
WHO regards the prevention of violence in general -- and violence against women in particular -- a high priority. It offers technical expertise to countries wishing to work against violence, and urges international donors to support such work. It continues to emphasize the importance of action-oriented, ethically based research, such as this Study, to increase our understanding of the problem and what to do about it. It also strongly urges the health sector to take a more proactive role in responding to the needs of the many women living in violent relationships.
Summary Report, full text (pdf)
WHO Multi-Country Study on Women's Health and Domestic Violence Against Women
Women in a dangerous world
No place for your daughters
Nov 24th 2005, The Economist
Counting the victims
TUNING in round the clock, via satellite or internet blog, to any bout of mayhem anywhere, you might not think the world was becoming a more peaceable place. But in some ways it is, and measurably so. A recent Human Security Report released by the Liu Institute at the University of British Columbia registers a 40% drop in the number of armed conflicts between 1992 and 2003, with the worst wars, those claiming more than a thousand lives in battle, down by 80%. While 28 armed struggles for self-determination ignited or reignited between 1991 and 2004, an encouraging 43 others were contained or doused.
Yet measured in a different way, from the point of view of the half of the world's population that is female, argues the Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of the Armed Forces, the world is an awfully violent place, and not just in its war zones. Men still fill most of the bodybags in wartime, including in civil wars, even on DCAF's figures, but their sisters, mothers, wives and daughters, it argues in a new report entitled “Women in an Insecure World”, face nothing short of a “hidden gendercide”.
( Read More )
AIDS: The Strategy Is Wrong
By Richard Holbrooke, washingtonpost.com, Tuesday, November 29, 2005
Thursday is the 18th annual World AIDS Day, a time for countless statements of concern and commitment from world leaders, thousands of commemorations and remembrances, and reams of statistics. One important article has already appeared on this page, by Jim Yong Kim, the highly respected director of the HIV-AIDS Department of the World Health Organization [Nov. 23]. After recounting the grim statistics -- 3 million deaths in the past year alone, 5 million new infections this year, rising infection rates in nearly every part of the world and an admission that "good news is hard to find in the new U.N. report" -- Kim wrote that he was nonetheless "optimistic that the epidemic can be stopped."
I respect Kim and admire his commitment, as well as that of every foot soldier in this war. I share that commitment. With respect, then, to my friends and colleagues in the field -- most far more qualified than I am -- I must nonetheless mark World AIDS Day with a word of pessimism that they will not necessarily welcome. We have to face the truth: We are not winning the war on AIDS, and our current strategies are not working. Every year since the first World AIDS Day, the number of people affected has increased. The very best that can be said is that we are losing at a slightly slower rate.
( Read More )
