A World With(out) Pretty Faces

David Smith

Ms. Beverly

EC102-MWF10-10:50

15 March 2017

A World With (out) Pretty Faces

In America, as we all know by now, violence is at every corner, most of it against women. This is definitely a sad case not only because it is violence against women, the women themselves, do not speak up enough for themselves. It has been an ongoing, and growing issue that in my view, has to stop. But clearly this cannot simply vanish. It takes willingness, self-control, honesty, and time, a lot of it. This issue, as we all know is not anything new as previously stated before, it is growing, it has to end, and it has been an issue from the start of its origins definitely, since marriage was a thing. Only comparatively recently has violence against women become an issue into the limelight. The purpose of this paper, is to state, display, and prove facts about violence against women in the World and the fact that this world has to face the fact that we will never have a world without violence against women. They are several points prepared for this topic, which are; how many countries treat women inferior to men, how women are naturally weaker than men, some cases are known because the abuser may famous not all violence against women is physical, what are some programs and groups used to prevent abuse, and what are men doing to prevent these problems. If things in our society stay the way they are now, we will not have a world in which we are ridden of violence against women.

According to McPhillips, many Muslim-majority nations are widely viewed as the worst countries for gender equality. Women around the world are in constant battle to protect themselves and their rights. She also mentions that in the United States, on the regular, more than one and three women fears being sexually assaulted. To dig further into this, nearly 2.5 million cases of sexual assault were reported globally in 2014. Most countries reported in excess of 100 instances of rap or assault for every 100,000 people. McPhillips also stated that of the countries that reported, the United States had an especially high rate of rape, specifically. In the Pacific, South Asia, and East Asia, much violent activity is linked back to human trafficking women and girls, which unfortunately, affects them. These stats are very alarming and they are only growing yearly, with little to no help to decrease them. Not to mention this is the general, broad overview of the violence against women, not to the specific aspects of different areas on violence. Another shocking finding by McPhillips, is that more than an estimated 200 million females in 30 countries have underwent female genital mutilation, within a  few months to years after being born.

On average, most women are weaker than the men who abuse them; this does not even have to be a fact for everyone to realize this. It is common sense. A women being physically abused clearly cannot defend themselves because the men will out match her in size, weight, strength, the list goes on. This is not because women choose to be weaker; clearly they are naturally, on average weaker than men. A study done by Razib Khan shows that on average, that even the weakest man they tested was twice as strong as the weakest and the weakest female athlete they measured, was only as strong about the average male. Based off these stats, we can only imagine how strong a male athlete is compared to a regular woman. The difference would be enormous, also not to forget that there is an incredible amount of domestic violence done against women at the hands of male athletes. This has become so common that it is almost anticipated from athletes, especially football players, one of the strongest types of athletes on the planet, which carries into my next point. [McPhillips]

Most people should know by now that if there is a case about violence against women, it is most likely from an athlete in particular. It seems to be a trend that unfortunately, is only growing despite several polices set in place in respective sports against these types of actions. For a prime, clear-cut example, would be the case of Ray Rice and his wife in 2014. Ray was charged with assault against his then fiancé Janay Palmer. He allegedly was in an elevator with her the night before their wedding when they argued and he struck her unconscious. When she was rendered unconscious, he dragged her out the elevator to their room. Security footage was released once a witness to him dragging her reported it and Ray was arrested and weeks later suspended the indefinitely and lost his job, his career, ruined. There are other instances for example Ray McDonald when he threatened to strike his wife while she had their baby in her arms. The video surfaced to public eye months after his ex-fiancé recorded part of the incident that night. McDonald was accused of breaking down a bedroom door and assaulting his ex-fiancé as she held their two-month-old child. Even with the video and his ex-fiancé with bruises, a jury was not able to indict McDonald. [SBNation.com] [DailyMail.com]

Violence against women is not just limited to athletes, even artists get involved with these types of incidents, and another prime example would be the abuse of Tina Turner, suffered from the hands of her own husband Ike Turner. None is better known than Ike and Tina Turner's relationship turmoil. Tina wrote about years of ill treatment that included a broken jaw and a bloody fight with Ike in a Las Vegas limousine that led her to finally leaving him.                  [The Hollywood Reporter]

Next point up is how not all violence that occurs against women is done physically. They are other types of violence against women such as stalking, as well as emotional abuse. According to the Stalking Resource Center, 6.6 million people are stalked in one year in the United States alone. As a country that could roughly equal an entire city’s population.  One in six women have experienced stalking victimization at some point during their lifetime in which they felt very fearful or believed that they or someone close to them would be harmed or killed. So for every six females, one of them felt scared for their lives or someone close to them. The majority of stalking victims are stalked by someone they know.

 In addition, a current or former intimate partner stalks about 66% of female victims of stalking.  More than half of female victims of stalking indicated that they were stalked before the age of 25.  About 1 in 5 female victims experienced stalking between the ages of 11 and 17. This is the scariest fact presented of them all. This would mean that throughout middle school and high school, chances of you being stalked were high for 7 years. So either a female or her group her friends have been stalked in their lifetime. Emotional abuse can range from different things from your significant other monitoring what you do all the time, control how you spend money, to deciding what to wear or eat for you, threatening to harm themselves when upset and even humiliate you in front of others. According to Springtide Resources, more women experience emotional abuse than physical violence. 35% of all women who are or have been in married or common-law relationships have experienced emotional abuse compared to 29% of the women who have been physically assaulted by other types of male partners.[Stalking Resource Center] [Springtide Resources]