violence against women

Eve is once more reporting from the Congo and wondering out loud when people, when the President are going to stop this atrocity.

From Huffington Post

I have been in Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo for the month of December. Christmas at Panzi Hospital was overflowing with raped and tortured women. Many young girls, several under 14, carrying babies. Every day at least 13 new women arrive seeking care to repair the damage done to their bodies from the rapes and sexual torture.

Since Secretary Clinton's wildly publicized and celebrated visit in August, since the UN's report of success for the Kimia II military operation, since the international community in theory woke up to horrors of the merciless economic war in the Congo, the war rages on and takes its toll. I know because I sat with women who live in the bush, many of whom have now been raped two or three times. I sat holding them as their bodies shook uncontrollably, as they leaked urine from fistula, as they compulsively wrung their hands and hid their faces behind their panges and rocked and cried out to God as they told me their stories:

Here is just one of the stories Ensler recounts.

After I returned home from The New Agenda's Violence Against Women Forum last Saturday, I couldn't stop talking to my husband about it. (I, like one of my favorite bloggers, AnnaBelle P, am extremely blessed to have a husband with whom I can discuss these types of issues.)

Violence against women has been on my mind a lot lately. High-profile cases such as Chris Brown's alleged beating of his girlfriend, Rihanna, and New York State Senator Hiram Montserrate's alleged assault on his girlfriend, Karla Giraldo, not to mention the not-as-well-known uptick in incidences of female genital mutilation in Great Britain, added to the astonishing figure of 130 million living women who have been permanently scarred by this horrifying procedure, plus the fact that one out of every three women has been sexually or physically abused in the course of her life, well...let's just say I haven't been able to stop thinking about it.

True to my Virgoan nature, I have been trying to analyze why this keeps happening to women. Why are statistics like this accepted and acceptable?

According to the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, women experience about 4.8 million intimate partner-related physical assault and rapes every year. With those numbers in mind, can we see anything wrong here with the following website screen shot:

Most people in this country do not know how explicitly misogynistic Barack Obama's campaign was. They don't have time to sit at the computer and read The Daily Kos, or Talking Points Memo, or The Huffington Post. They didn't read the vile, endless hatred spewed at women by Obama's supporters. They believe the lovely stories spun by the corporate media: that Obama was saintly and above all negativity and "unifying," while his opponents rolled around in dirt. And even when Obama or his surrogates did or said something overtly misogynistic, the media either did not cover it, or excused it.