INTERVIEW-Violence is the biggest challenge facing women, says top women’s rights advocate
March 6, 2017
NEW YORK, March 6 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Violence is the biggest challenge facing women around the world as progress in gender equality is erratic and at times a baffling contradiction, said the top official at UN Women ahead of International Women’s Day.
Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, executive director of UN Women, said despite decades of pushing for equal rights, no one nation could call itself gender equal with countries making advances in some areas yet backsliding in others.
Mlambo-Ngcuka described the global gender pay gap of 24 percent as “the biggest robber” of women. UN Women is launching a global coalition to tackle pay inequality during the meeting of the UN Commission on the Status of Women next week.
But Mlambo-Ngcuka said the biggest difficulty facing women is violence. One in three women suffer physical or sexual violence during their lifetime, and half of female murder victims are killed by partners or family members, according to UN Women.
Some 120 million girls worldwide, roughly one in 10, have experienced forced intercourse or other sexual acts, the group says.
“Obviously, class and geography help some women to survive this issue differently, but everywhere in the world the big issue of violence against women is a reality, whether you are rich or poor, in a developed or developing country,” she said.
“Even countries that have the highest indicators on gender equality like Iceland, they still have to confront the issue of violence against women,” Mlambo-Ngcuka told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in an interview.
Iceland was shaken in January by the violent death of a 20-year-old woman in Reykjavik. A crewmember from a Greenlandic trawler has been arrested in connection with her death.
Mlambo-Ngcuka, a South African, has since 2013 headed the United Nations’ body charged with promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment. She was a member of parliament in South Africa’s first democratic government and the nation’s first female deputy president.
