November 25 marked the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. But global statistics and recent events suggest that the world has a long way to go before the scourge of misogyny-based violence is in the rearview mirror.
According to the Council of Europe, domestic violence “is a rising phenomenon … that affects every type of family relationship and social class,” with some 15% of European women facing violence at home every day.
World Health Organization (WHO) statistics published in 2022 paint an even grimmer picture, claiming that about one in every three women (30%) experience physical and or sexual violence, mostly at the hands of an intimate partner. Similarly, the WHO also claims that as many as 38% of all murders of women worldwide are committed by intimate partners, and 6% of all women report having been sexually assaulted by someone other than a partner.
To put these figures into perspective: that's an estimated 736 million women worldwide being put in danger. Moreover, the WHO finds that “such violence starts alarmingly early, [with] 24% of adolescent girls aged 15 to 19 who have had an intimate relationship” experiencing physical or sexual violence at their partners’ hands.
Among the world’s worst offenders, according to The World Bank, are the Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh. In these countries, upwards of 50% of women aged 15 to 49 experience intimate partner violence (IPV) in their lifetimes … roughly 35% within the last 12 months.
In China, where the demographic is overwhelmingly male, women from small villages are reportedly sold into slavery en masse. This includes women from surrounding countries like North Korea, too, from where human rights activist Yeonmi Park and her mother were both sold into slavery in 2007 when Park was just 13 years old.
Throughout the Middle East and North Africa, Reuters broke reports in June of human trafficking taking place from African countries like Nigeria for prostitution in the United Arab Emirates.
The biggest abusers, however, are the West Bank, Gaza, and Iran, with nearly 20% of women there, aged 15 to 49, experiencing IPV in the last year, and 30% over the course of their lifetimes. This is without mentioning the oppression of women like Mahsa Amini—whose murder at the hands of Iran’s “morality police” in September 2022 sparked widespread protests and calls of “Women, Life, Freedom.”
Not an insurmountable problem
Despite these troubling trends, global organizations like the WHO and UN Women are leading the charge against gender-based violence. They are arguing that their missions to raise awareness of violence against women and to combat it can be accomplished if reporting is done properly, and if nations take steps to address the underlying causes exposed by such reports.
But the UN in general, and UN Women, specifically, are coming under fire for failing to live up to their raison d'être—to fight for the safety of all women everywhere—particularly after the Palestinian terror group Hamas committed atrocities on October 7, which left over 1,200 murdered and thousands injured.
In addition to the mountains of evidence of Hamas torturing, beheading, burning alive, and executing civilians, there are widespread accounts of their brutal sexual violence.
In Israel, first responder units, police investigators, and volunteers at pop-up mortuaries, working to identify and process the victims, have all attested to evidence of systemic sexual violence perpetrated by the Hamas terrorists against women and girls of all ages. Multiple Hamas terrorists even admitted to being ordered by their superiors to rape their victims to “dirty” and humiliate them, as exposed by interrogation videos after the terror attack.
One surviving witness from the Nova music festival described watching multiple terrorists gang-raping an Israeli girl, each one raping her before passing her off to the next Hamas terrorist. A volunteer at the Shura identification center described seeing a woman whose pelvis was broken by the brutality of her sexual attack. A first responder in the southern kibbutzim described seeing the bodies of two young teenage girls—who had been executed—with their pants down and sperm on their backs.
The list goes on, and the stories only get worse.
Yet despite growing accounts of sexual violence against women in Israel on October 7, UN Women and many other international women’s organizations have failed to even mention—let alone condemn—them as they have with practically every other non-Israeli case mentioned above.
Hamas's October 7 terrorism
In fact, since the October 7 massacre, UN Women has taken a particular interest in Gaza and the Palestinians. The organization has published 41 statements, speeches, features, news briefs, and articles since October 7. Eleven of them—more than 25%—focus on violence against women in Gaza (often in the context of Israeli airstrikes), including five feature articles. None detail crimes against Israel.
The closest UN Women came to such condemnation was in a blanket statement issued on October 13, a week after the Hamas massacre, which read: “UN Women condemns the attacks on civilians in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories and is deeply alarmed by the devastating impact on civilians including women and girls.” The same statement then goes on to focus on Gaza and Palestinian women.
In light of this, citizen groups and public officials, including Michal Herzog, an Israeli attorney and the wife of Israeli President Isaac Herzog, have voiced harsh condemnations against UN Women prior to November 25, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. In Herzog’s sharply critical opinion piece published in Newsweek on November 22, she wrote: “It is not that condemnations of gender-based violence by Hamas have been weak or insufficient—there have been none at all. Statement after statement by organizations like UN Women, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) have failed to condemn these crimes. They failed us, and all women, at this critical moment.”
Similarly, a new global campaign entitled “#MeToo_UNless_UR_a_Jew”—a reference to the global #MeToo movement that began in 2006 to expose widespread sexual violence and led to high-profile cases against sexual predators like Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein—is now gaining worldwide attention.
This hashtag campaign, currently going viral on social media, was launched by Angle, which, according to its press release, is “an awareness raising group that formed in the wake of the current Israel-Hamas war to combat widespread misinformation, [and which] demands that UN Women formally condemn the attacks without equivocation, as well as call on Hamas to release the hostages, including 100 women and girls.”
As of this writing, the campaign’s accompanying petition has reached nearly 283,000 signatures.