Today is International Women's Day.
This is why we still need women's day:
In the UK alone there are estimated to be 78,000 rapes per year (this statistic includes male rapes before anybody throws their fedora at me), 79% of which go unreported, top reasons for this being fear of judgement or fear that the Police will not consider it rape.
Only 8% of these are strangers and yet we still teach women that to avoid being raped to never leave a drink unattended or take directions from a strange man.
82% of rapes don't come to trial.
One of the top reasons victims choose not to continue court action is being poorly treated by the police.
Only 7% of reported rapes in the UK end in a conviction, in India the conviction rate is 24.2% remember that the next time you are considering posting something bigoted about Indian men.
Elsewhere:
In April 2014, 276 school girls were kidnapped by Boko Haram, 50 later managed to escape while the remainder have been reportedly forced into marriages by their captors, when this first happened it lead to the hashtag campaign #bringbackourgirls which had over a million uses in a very short space of time, and also featured the misuse of completely unrelated photos of women of colour in Guinea-Bissau, a country 1,000 miles away from Nigeria, where the school girls were kidknapped. Almost as quickly as it happened, the hashtag vanished again, and those girls are still missing.
http://www.pri.org/stories/2014-05-09/how-wrong-photos-became-faces-viral-bringbackourgirls-campaign).
This week:
Another hashtag #thedress went viral as people wondered if a dress was black and blue or gold and white, and The Salvation Army have jumped on the buzz train to use it in a campaign against domestic violence against women.
This seems like a great idea until you realise that The Salvation Army has a history of discrimination against LGBTQ people.
61% of bisexual women experience rape, physical violence, and/or stalking in their lifetimes as a result of Intimate Partner Violence.
46% of Transpeople in a study that took place in Scotland had experienced abusive relationships.
While The Salvation Army in the UK claims to condemn homophobia they have never apologised for their opposition to the repeal of Section 28
"We can easily envisage a situation where, due to active promotion of homosexuality in schools, children will grow up feeling alienated if they fail to conform." - Colonel John Flett, the church's Scotland Secretary in 2000
and worldwide they continue to discriminate against LGBTQ people.
These are just three issues, there are many, many more.
And before anybody chimes in about how International Women's Day is sexist because men don't have a day, they do, it takes place on November 19th
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