TeKNOWLEDGEy : Violence Against Women

Okay, I know the blog title seems a bit cheesy (and it's been used before), but it’s an interesting point just the same. After all, think about a few of the main issues that keep women down. Money and information. There are more poor women in the world than poor men. Same in the US. This is no mistake.

By definition, poverty is a lack of resources. In the technologized world in which we live, information/knowledge are resources that require other resources (time and money) to acquire. The knowledge we have come to value is the knowledge that can be dispersed and packaged electronically. How often do we give thought to those individuals who do not have access to the required technology to access resources? How often do we consider that these individuals are more likely to be women? To be single mothers? Women are placed in vulnerable positions everyday in an attempt to access one resource or another; all over the world women are forced to sell their bodies to feed themselves and their children or their families sell their bodies to feed the male childre. And it is the women who are criminalized, ostracized and imprisoned for this. They are kept illiterate. The amount of knowledge they can have is controlled by men (husbands, brothers, fathers, government officials). Violate and violence have similar roots (obviously). So, then to violate a basic human right (that of engaging in communication with other human beings) is merely one step toward actual physical violence against women. I can almost guarantee that there are far more men in the world who have the ability to access my blog (and the other blogs of this movement) than there are women. Men AND women need to hear our message.

Maybe I don’t have some grand, sweeping point to make here. Just that we consider how access to resources and knowledge is inequitable in our world and how that is connected to violence against women. It is a self-fulfilling phenomenon by which women are proven to be lesser beings and remain subjugated.

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