Violence against women

“ The crime bill also included the landmark Violence Against Women Act. For the first time in our history, the Federal Government is now a full partner in the effort to stop domestic violence. The Violence Against Women Act combines tough new sanctions against abusers with assistance to police, to prosecutors, and to shelters in the fight against domestic violence. ”

“ That law imposed tough new penalties for actions of violence against women. It helped to train police, prosecutors, and judges to better understand domestic violence, to recognize its symptoms when they see them, and to take steps to prevent them. ”

“ Then came the militants, and, by smashing windows and arson and general terrorism, revived the ape in men, so that, for some years past, all women are once more in danger of violence from men. It is degrading to both men and women, and the only merit that I can see in the process is, that men who have so loved to exercise all the virtues vicariously in their women, are being a little shocked to see how ugly violence can be, and, from seeing it ugly in a woman may, by and by, turn to see it ugly in themselves. ”

“ Just as we must support the desire for freedom and the battles that, in some countries, from Afghanistan to Iran, women are carrying on with courage and determination and to reclaim their role in society.
Unfortunately, even in Italy the picture remains worrying and requires the utmost attention from the institutions. Feminicide is the final act of violence against women. It is the extreme form of the most brutal and most evident violence, the physical one, which has many possible ways of exercising: from threats to persecution, from mistreatment to rapes. ”

“ The argument that because men have used violence in the past for the accomplishment of their purpose women should use it in the present is not a good one. Those methods were used by unlettered men, hungry men with starving wives and families, in hot moments of terrible indignation, and what was pardonable in these circumstances is not pardonable in educated women with every facility for education and with the enormous weapon of passive resistance at their command with which to bring men and Governments to reason. ”

“ This important piece of legislation, which contains a broad array of ground-breaking measures to combat violence against women, combines tough penalties with programs to prosecute offenders and provide assistance to women who are survivors of violence. ”

“ Because domestic violence usually takes place in private, many Americans may not realize how widespread it is. According to the National Violence Against Women Survey, conducted jointly by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institute of Justice, each year in the United States approximately 1.5 million women are raped and/or physically assaulted by their current or former husbands, partners, or boyfriends. ”

“ In all crimes requiring a certain amount of brute strength, such as burglary, robbery with violence, and so on, the proportion of women to men is small. A woman very rarely possesses the animal force requisite for the perpetration of crimes accompanied with much personal violence. But where the element of personal violence does not come conspicuously to the front the proportion of female criminals to male immediately rises, and in such crimes as poisoning, child murder, abortion, domestic theft, women are more criminally disposed than men. ”

“ Calls on all parties to armed conflict to take special measures to protect women and girls from gender-based violence, particularly rape and other forms of sexual abuse, and all other forms of violence in situations of armed conflict ”

“ If we realize this we can understand why it is that a group of women who, even in the effort to support a good cause, revert to the crude method of violence are committing a double wrong. They are wronging their own sex by proving false to its best traditions, and they are wronging civilization by attempting to revive methods of savagery which it is civilization's mission to repress. Therefore it may fairly be held that even if the methods of the suffragettes were really adequate to secure women's suffrage, the attainment of the franchise by those methods would be a misfortune. ”

“ Preventing and responding to gender-based violence is a cornerstone of my Administration's commitment to advance gender equality and women's empowerment. Such violence significantly hinders the ability of individuals to fully participate in, and contribute to, their communities -- economically, politically, and socially. ”

“ One woman I saw thrown down with violence three or four times in rapid succession, until at last she lay only half conscious against the curb, and in a serious condition was carried away by kindly strangers. Every moment the struggle grew fiercer, as more and more women arrived on the scene. Women, many of them eminent in art, in medicine and science, women of European reputation, subjected to treatment that would not have been meted out to [Pg 181] criminals, and all for the offence of insisting upon the right of peaceful petition. ”

“ Noting that civilians account for the vast majority of those adversely affected by armed conflict; that women and girls are particularly targeted by the use of sexual violence, including as a tactic of war to humiliate, dominate, instil fear in, disperse and/or forcibly relocate civilian members of a community or ethnic group ”

“ And how many thousands are there among the lowest classes in every country, who, without being in a legal sense malefactors in any other respect, because in every other quarter their aggressions meet with resistance, indulge the utmost habitual excesses of bodily violence towards the unhappy wife, who alone, at least of grown persons, can neither repel nor escape from their brutality ”

“ The weaker sex was better protected from the violence of human passions than among other nations. “The laws concerning women were very severe. Those who violated a free woman were mutilated, for this crime was considered inclusive of three great evils, insult, corruption of morals, and confusion of children. For adultery without violence, the man was condemned to receive a thousand stripes, and the woman to have her nose cut off—the lawgiver wishing her to be deprived of the attractions she had availed herself of to allure.” ”

“ They seek the total control of every person, and mind, and soul, a harsh society in which women are voiceless and brutalized. They seek bases of operation to train more killers and export more violence. ”

“ WHEREAS, these attacks upon defenseless women are not only an outrage and crime in themselves, that prove the perpetrators and those lending aid to the same to be cowards, but in addition, create throughout the world contempt for the United States and set a vicious example to the people throughout the United States and the world at large, of lawlessness and violence ”

“ That they have provoked discussion and aroused attention is equally obvious and from these our cause always stands to gain. On the other hand many of us feel a profound conviction, which experience only strengthens, that women arc adopting a mistaken course in ap- pealing to violence. Our business as women asking for justice is not to rely upon physical force but in the eternal principles of right and justice. Law abiding methods alienate no one while methods of violence and disorder create anti-suffragists by the hundreds. ”

“ Keeping women safe and healthy also requires us to redouble out commitment to stopping the violence that is committed against women in this country. One in four women suffers from domestic violence in her lifetime. ”

“ I purposely forbear to mention instances of personal violence to colored women travelling in less civilized sections of our country, where women have been forcibly ejected from cars, thrown out of seats, their garments rudely torn, their person wantonly and cruelly injured. ”

“ Supports the regional initiatives on the issue of gender related violence in armed conflict to influence regional and local decision makers, aimed at the implementation of the commitments of the Kampala Declaration addressing impunity for gender based crimes at the country level and to improve women’s visibility, empowerment and resilience ”

“ Approximately 1,400 women a year -- four every day -- die in the United States as a result of domestic violence. And 132,000 women report that they have been victims of a rape or attempted rape, and it is estimated that an even greater number have been raped but do not report it. ”

“ But the struggle to end domestic violence is far from over. According to a recent Justice Department study for 1992 and 1993, women are about six times more likely than men to experience violence committed by offenders with whom they had an intimate relationship. ”

“ With respect to domestic violence, Congress received evidence for the following findings:
"Three out of four American women will be victims of violent crimes sometime during their life." H. R. Rep. No. 103-395 p. 25 (1993) (citing U.S. Dept. of Justice, Report to the Nation on Crime and Justice 29 (2d ed. 1988) ) .
"Violence is the leading cause of injuries to women ages 15 to 44 ... ”

“ Furthermore, in the same city of Kharkov on 16 November 19 persons, including one woman, were hanged from the balconies of a number of houses.”
The bestial acts of violence perpetrated against the women everywhere testify to the profound moral corruption of the criminals. I shall quote from that passage in the note which Your Honors will find on Page 4, Paragraph 4, of the document book:
“Women and young girls are vilely outraged in all the occupied areas. ”

“ But it is not merely in cases of murder, attempted murder or serious assault that justice is mocked by the present state of our law and its administration in the interests of the female sex. The same attitude is observed, the same farcical sentences on women, whether the crime be theft, fraud, common assault, criminal slander or other minor offences. ”

“ Under cover of the notion of chivalry, as understood by Modern Feminism, Political and Sentimental Feminists alike would deprive men of the most elementary rights of self-defence against women and would exonerate the latter practically from all punishment for the most dastardly crimes against men. ”

“ It is a sociological axiom that a nation’s integrity depends on its womanhood.
The depraved woman means the depraved man. Each night thousands of youths, full of physical strength, mental energy and ambition, seek recreation in the cafes. It is there they meet or take the lost women. It is there they wreck bright futures, sow the seed of crime, deaden their moral consciences, and contract fatal diseases and rush unthinking down the path that leads to ruin and to death. ”

“ Hardened by a fierce struggle and strengthened by a vicious persecution, those brave champions of sex-freedom defied the respectable mob by proclaiming their independence from prevailing cant and hypocrisy. They inaugurated the tremendous sex revolt among the American women—a purely native movement which has yet to find its historian. ”

“ They do not realise that the question is not of the physical strength of women as women, but of the whole forces of the State [168] being at the disposal of women to set in motion to gratify their whims and passions. The idea of a sex war in which women take the field against men, such as represents the inwardness of the whole Feminist Movement of to-day, seems to them ridiculous. ”

“ Give men reasonable justice as against women, cease to trample underfoot every principle of equity and fair play at the behest of feminist shrieks, and the excuse, or at least, palliation which now undoubtedly exists for any sporadic brutality on the part of men, and especially husbands, of which women may be the victims, would be done away with. ”

“ We echo the sentiment of the 'Philadelphia Sunday Dispatch:' 'Shame upon the men who, while prating about their respectability, would combine to rob women of the means of supporting themselves and their families! Such infinitesimal littleness cannot benefit them. The public are ever willing to aid the weak, and support them against the strong. The war against women cannot be sustained by the public voice: it will recoil upon and injure those who are so arbitrary and selfish as to endeavor to interfere with them.'"—Antislavery Standard, July, 1859. ”

“ It is undoubtedly a terrible thing that the woman has been executed; but consider what would happen to a state, particularly in war, if it left crimes aimed at the safety of its armies to go unpunished because committed by women. ”

“ Woman's delicacy and keenness of emotional life, when their undue exercise or unbalanced proportions seek expression in the criminal act, lead to crimes against persons, not against property. Even incendiarism, so commonly practised by men from motives of revenge, is but seldom attempted by women. The enmities of women are never general. ”

“ The more or less inchoate assumptions of the second or sentimental side of the modern “Woman's Movement” amounts practically, as already stated, to a claim for women to be allowed to commit crimes without incurring the penalties imposed by the law for similar crimes when committed by men. ”