Author: riane eisler

Most leaders and the press view violence against women and children as just “a women’s issue” or “a children’s issue” – in their minds, a secondary issue. But it’s not only that millions of women and children are victims of violence in their homes every year; the fact is that intimate violence provides a basic model for using force to impose one’s will on others.
When children either experience or observe violence against their mothers in their homes, they learn that it’s ok, even “moral,” to use violence to impose one’s will on others. This is why throughout history, the most violently despotic and warlike societies have been those where violence, or the threat of violence, is used to maintain domination of parent over child and man over woman.

We see this connection vividly in many regions of the world that have spawned terrorists, regions where women and children are literally terrorized into submission. But the link between intimate violence and political violence is not limited to so-called “religious fundamentalists.” It was present in the European Middle Ages, in Hitler’s Germany, and in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Neither is it coincidental that in the U.S. today those pushing “crusades” against “evil enemies” oppose equal rights for women and advocate harshly punitive childrearing.

The time has come for progressive leaders to make ending violence against women and children a top priority. The good news is that the United Nations is recognizing that violence against women and children as the most ubiquitous human rights violation worldwide. Another piece of good news is that the issue of “domestic violence ” – that is, beating of women by men who say they love them – is also gaining world attention, and though more slowly, so are the sexual mutilation of girls that is practiced in many parts of Africa and the Middle East, the bride burning still common in parts of India, the global sexual slave trade, and other horrible human rights violations.

Yet many customs and public policies still condone the subordination of women and support, and even promote, intimate violence. If we are serious about social justice and peace, we must give primary attention to the formative gender and parent-child relations. Only through an integrated progressive agenda that takes into account both the personal and public sphere can we build foundations for cultures of peace rather than war.

An initiative I’m passionately involved in is the Spiritual Alliance to Stop Intimate Violence (www.saiv.net). SAIV brings a strong – unconscionably still missing – moral voice to ending violence against women and children by engaging spiritual and religious leaders to make healing intimate violence a priority. This initiative is one of many we can – and must – support if we are to end intimate terror and create a more peaceful world.

As Women’s History Month wraps up, it’s high time for the United States to finally ratify the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, and change the shameful fact that we’re practically the only nation that has failed to do so.

Some people may think equality between women and men is “just a women’s issue” and that this is a time when we have to address “more important” matters. But in fact, the movement toward gender equity is central to the success of the global movement toward more democratic and egalitarian relations in both the so-called private and public spheres.

Societies where women’s and men’s roles are rigidly circumscribed, which are generally also rigidly male-dominated societies, are by and large societies where we see a generally authoritarian, top-down family and social structure.

For example, with the rise to power of Hitler in Germany and the imposition of a brutally authoritarian and very violent regime, there was a strong push to return women to their “traditional” roles in a male-dominated family. When Khomeini came to power in Iran and imposed severe theocratic control, one of his first acts was to repeal laws giving women some family rights. And right here in the United States, the people who believe in “holy wars” and theocratic rule also see the return to a “traditional” male-dominated, authoritarian, highly punitive family as a top priority.

Conversely, in the Nordic nations, strong emphasis on gender equality has gone along with both political and economic democracy, as well as with social priority given to activities stereotypically associated with women such as child care, health care and environmental housekeeping.

This should not surprise us, since the domination of one half of humanity by the other is a basic model for all forms of domination. Conversely, the equal valuing of the two halves of humanity teaches children from early on to value diversity, rather than seeing it as a reason for ranking superior” people over “inferior” ones. This is why those parts of our world where the movement to raise the status of women has been most successful are also more generally democratic.

Raising the status of women worldwide is essential if we are to move to a world of greater partnership and peace. It is high time the United States regain its place of leadership in the movement toward freedom, democracy, and equality – beginning with equality between the two halves of humanity: women and men.

Riane Eisler is President of the Center for Partnership Studies (www.partnershipway.org) and is best known as author of The Chalice and The Blade and The Real Wealth of Nations.