Women's Lot In India

"Although gender-based discrimination of female children is pervasive in developing countries, India is one of the worst culprits. Female discrimination, which starts in the womb, continues throughout women's lives."
"A survey by the Thomas Reuters Foundation found that India is the fourth most dangerous place in the world for women."
Cesar Chelala, M.D., Ph.D., global public health consultant

Hurt: Sonia (pictured) was travelling home with her friend Prajuna when two truck drivers, who had befriended their families, offered them a lift home. But instead of taking them back, they raped the schoolgirls, leaving them to walk home half-naked and bleeding

Horrific gang rapes in India are common. Girls and women of the lower caste are generally the target and they are often left for dead or murdered, since particularly in more remote rural areas the law is soft on men who commit these atrocities, and women and girls who survive their assaults and attempt to lodge official complaints are often ignored. The women are viewed by their society as having been defiled, and though they are the victims they are seen as having brought dishonour to their families.

Family members often attempt to persuade survivors of rape and violence that it would be best not to say or do anything to bring further attention to their plight. Their future role in their society is all but obliterated; what they suffered will have made them indeed untouchable. But it is all women who are vulnerable to sexual assault in a country where too many men seem to feel it is their right to exploit and harm women as easy prey that few bother to question.

Criminal sexual assault has countless victims, and the plight of the unprotected is dreadful, but sexual assault happens anywhere in the country, it is not exclusive to those whom custom and culture linked to fundamentalist religious values are seen as game for the upper classes. Genera discrimination in India slams up hard against an emerging economy whose rapid technological development equates with more and better employment opportunities, at least for the educated.

But from groping on crowded public transit to shouted lewd suggestions, to being stalked, to facing an attacker who knows he will not face insurmountable punishment, women live daily lives of public torment and fear. 

Twelve-year-old Pinky had gone to see a wedding procession when a female neighbour invited her to her home. There, she gagged Pinky and handed her over to her brother-in-law, who raped the young girl. They then threatened Pinky to remain silent, but she found the courage to tell her parents, who reported it to police. Smita hopes telling stories like this one will encourage others to speak out

Researchers with the medical journal The Lancet have given an estimate of over a half-million females aborted as a result of sex selection since the introduction of ultrasound. Now that prenatal sex identification makes it easier for prospective parents to know what gender a woman is carrying, there are fewer incidents of post-birth deaths among girl babies, but it does still occur. Ultrasound makes feticide more convenient as a disposal method of an  unwanted girl child.

In Indian culture traditionally inheritance rights are with a male offspring. And traditionally it was male children who were expected to look after their aging parents. Girls, once they married, were absorbed into another family. Dowries, though now illegal are a condition of marriage whereby the bride's family must give to the groom goods and possessions that are to be his, not his new wife's, in the process enriching him and in no sense serving the interests of the bride's parents other than to reduce their resources while honouring custom.

Selective abortions may be illegal in India, just as discrimination against the Dalit, the lowest class (formerly known as 'untouchables') in the discriminatory caste system is illegal, but it carries on nevertheless. The ancient custom of a wife dying on the funeral pyre of her husband is also illegal and though no longer commonly practised, it does take place in remote areas still. Indian widows have no rights, and they are lost souls, consigned to live in poverty and isolation, cast from their families.

Thousands of widows have been making their way to one particular town in the north of India. Cast out by their families, or simply alone in the world, some travel hundreds of miles to get there, and nobody quite knows why

Acid-throwing is a particularly cruel and sinister punishment visited on girls and women of any class or religion. It is cruelly disfiguring if it doesn't kill the victim. She will live the rest of her life advertising by her appearance the dreadful punishment meted out to her for defying cultural normatives. Up to 70 percent of married women aged fifteen to 49 in India have been victims of beatings or coerced sex, according to the United Nations Population fund.

Domestic violence related to dowries can lead to desperation and suicide, and murder is not at all uncommon. When a girl or young woman enters the household of her husband she can also become no better than an indentured servant. Because of a shortage of marriageable Indian girls and women resulting from sex selection abortions, a trafficking of women has been on the increase. Women are sold as brides in areas of India where shortages are particularly acute.

Afghanistan
From an early age, life’s a struggle for Afghan girls, with 87 percent left illiterate and 70-80 percent forced into marriages (54% of girls aged between 15-19 are married, according to UNICEF).  Having a family can be an ordeal in itself: with a maternal mortality ratio of 400 in 100,000 (vs 8 for the UK), and cases of domestic violence high. Afghanistan’s courts make it notoriously difficult to prosecute the latter too, as family testimony is banned.
The Democratic Republic of Congo
Congo has one of the worst records of gender based violence (GBV), with the American Journal of Public Health estimating that 1,150 women are raped every day – equating to 420,000 a year. Health outcomes are inadequate for women too, with 57 percent of pregnant women reported to be anaemic.
Pakistan
Many of Pakistan’s cultural and religious practices pose a huge threat to women, particularly child and forced marriage, acid attacks and punishment by stoning. According to Pakistan’s Human Rights Commission, more than 1,000 girls and women are victims of ‘honour killings’ each year, and 90 percent face domestic violence.
India
Despite having the world’s largest democracy, famous examples of gang rape and hangings demonstrate what a perilous place India can be for women. Researchers estimate that there have been 50 million cases of female infanticide or foeticide over the last three decades. And even if you get to live, child marriage and high levels of trafficking still cast a shadow over the safety of females.
Somalia
High maternal mortality, rape, female genital mutilation (FGM) and child marriage are just every day concerns for a woman living in Somalia, a country typified by its lack of law and order. 95 percent of Somalia’s female inhabitants face FGM, usually around the ages of four to 11, and in their child-rearing years, only nine percent can expect to give birth in a health facility.
Colombia
GBV in Colombia is alarmingly high – in 2010, The National Institute for Legal Medicine and Forensic Science reported 45,000 cases of domestic violence against women. Still, few organised systems exist to help women and girls needing post-violence care, meaning that many do not receive appropriate medical treatment. To add insult to injury, it’s rare for GBV perpetrators to be brought to justice.
Egypt
The systematic sexual harassment of women and girls throughout Egypt is something that even casual visitors may have experienced. GBV and harassment increased in the wake of the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. In January, Egyptian groups reported that there were 19 cases of mob sexual assaults, with one victim raped with a bladed weapon. One of Egypt’s main failings when it comes to supporting women is its judicial system, which does not criminalise domestic violence, and ignores their rights when it comes to marriage, divorce, child custody and inheritance.
Kenya
Despite carrying out the majority of the country’s agricultural work, Kenya’s female inhabitants only receive a small part of the income they generate. In fact, just 29 percent of those earning a formal wage throughout the country are women. Educational prospects for girls are dreadful, as they are taught at an inferior level to their counterparts. Even worse, HIV infection rates are more prevalent among the female populace – partly due to the lack of control women have over their sex lives.
Mexico
With 4,000 cases of women disappearing in 2011-2012, and 22.7 murders for every 100,000 in Chihuahua state in 2012, you’d think the Mexican government and police would do everything possible to protect their inhabitants. Sadly women are massively let down by Mexico’s legal system, which does not protect against domestic and sexual violence. There are certain punishments set out for perpetrators of sexual violence against women, however judiciary officials often weight up the latter’s chastity when it comes to deciding a sentence – contradicting international standards. The unfortunate outcome of all of this is that few women come forward to report sexual offences. And when they do, they are frequently met with suspicion, apathy and disregard.
Brazil
For a country with many things going for it, Brazil has some troubling statistics. Reports indicate that every 15 seconds a woman is assaulted, and every two hours a woman is murdered. Brazil also has a bad record when it comes to reproductive choice as its criminal code bans abortions – except in cases of rape, or where it is physically dangerous to have the baby. Women who do not meet these exceptions and have an abortion can face up to three years in jail.
The New Economy

Sacrificing Children As Sex Possessions

"My parents are poor, they cannot afford to look after me. I helped my family when I got married; they no longer need to support me."
16-year-old Mozambican girl

"I was in the ninth grade. Now I get up at 6 a.m. I clean the house, then I clean my mother-in-law's house and I also work on the farm."
16-year-old in Inhambane province, Mozambique

"Mostly it's a situation where the mother herself was given away as a little girl, so they think it's normal."
"It becomes something generational."
Pascoa Claudino Sumbana Ferrao, government director, Inhambane City

"The problem is that girls and women are not allowed to speak. If a man stands up in church and says God showed him in a dream that he should marry a certain girl, then that is God's commandment which must be obeyed."
Zimbabwean church elder

Child bride in Niger -- The Economist

In Nigeria, 23 million girls and women were married in childhood, making that country home to the largest number of child brides in Africa. Elsewhere in Africa, Chad and Central African Republic are among the countries with the highest rates of child marriage today. The world gasped in horror as the Islamist terrorist group operating out of Nigeria, Boko Haram, kidnapped almost 300 schoolgirls in Chibok, where they attended a private school for girls. The wholesale abduction of hundreds of girls was viewed as an atrocity, and it was.

But the custom of male relatives of young girls selling those girls into marriages with mature and often much-older men prevails throughout Africa and south Asia. Those girls are sold, although the custom is to consider their selling price a 'bride price', much as cattle are sold at auction for whatever the going price might be, to add to an enterprising man's holdings. In this case, a young girl is considered the property of whoever offers the best bride price to an often rural, often penurious family.

It's hard to see how this practise is condoned and the abduction of hundreds is condemned. How different are they? In either instance, slavery results and a lifetime of misery.

The fate of one girl was outlined, a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl whose school uniform was discarded when she was handed a traditional wedding robe and informed her seventh-grade studies in South Africa were over because her male relatives had taken a $570 bride price from a man she had no idea even existed, who happened to be twice her age. After the marriage where she had been beaten and raped, she made a successful escape and reported her experience at a police station.

Officially, child-bride arranged marriages are forbidden by law in many of the countries where they occur. A law that is ignored in favour of what has become a tradition; selling young girls into lifetime servitude under the name of marriage. In the instance of the young girl who related her experience to police in South Africa, a criminal prosecution of child marriage resulted.

A recently released UNICEF report has highlighted the "lost childhoods and shattered futures", of these young girls with the demands that these governments enact more aggressive responses to put an end to the practise in Africa altogether. Where, across the continent girls are being used as possessions to be sold, the price bargained for to be used for family debts. Sometimes girls are sold into marriage in the belief that this will ensure they aren't able to engage in mischief.
What lies in store for these girls is anything but a placid future life of comfort and care as a valued companion for a man. Their lives are comprised of violent incidents, of poverty and risk of HIV, according to UNICEF. In the criminal case that took place in South Africa the husband was found guilty of rape, assault and human trafficking, sentenced to 22 years in prison for what he kept insisting was a traditional practise.

That tradition is called "ukuthwala". At one time young men would reach an agreement with a girl, and both would make an effort to convince her family to agree to their marrying. At the present time, some older men have taken to abducting girls, raping them, and forcing them into a 'marriage' that has more in common with slavery than marriage, according to the Commission for Gender Equality in South Africa.

In Ethiopia as well abductions and forced marriages of girls represented custom, but were outlawed in 2004. That this is against the law is no guarantee whatever that the practise will not continue, for it does. In Mozambique no laws exist to prevent child marriages. If a village community decides a girl should be married in a traditional ceremony her consent is not required and authorities are powerless to intervene. Nearly half of women between 20 and 24 married before the age of 18.

In Zimbabwean society early marriage is recognized as an avoidance of sin and child marriage is encouraged among the followers of churches combining evangelical Christianity and traditional African beliefs. Church leaders go so far as to enforce virginity testing rituals on girls as young as twelve.

Number of African child brides to soar by 2050 as population grows-U.N

• Pregnancy is consistently among the leading causes of death for girls ages 15 to 19 worldwide.
• Child brides often face a higher risk of contracting HIV because they often marry an older man with more sexual experience. Girls ages 15 – 19 are 2 to 6 times more likely to contract HIV than boys of the same age in sub-Saharan Africa.
• Girls who marry before 18 are more likely to experience domestic violence than their peers who marry later. A study conducted by ICRW in two states in India found that girls who were married before 18 were twice as likely to report being beaten, slapped or threatened by their husbands than girls who married later.
• Child brides often show signs symptomatic of sexual abuse and post-traumatic stress such as feelings of hopelessness, helplessness and severe depression. 
• While countries with the highest prevalence of child marriage are concentrated in Western and Sub-Saharan Africa, due to population size, the largest number of child brides reside in South Asia.   
• Girls living in poor households are almost twice as likely to marry before 18 than girls in higher income households.
• More than half of the girls in Bangladesh, Mali, Mozambique and Niger are married before age 18. In these same countries, more than 75 percent of people live on less than $2 a day.   International Centre for Research on Women

Child Marriage Around the World
Percentage of girls marrying before the age of 18                      1 Niger 76.6
2 Chad 71.5
3 Bangladesh 68.7
4 Mali 65.4
5 Guinea 64.5
6 Central African Republic 57.0
7 Nepal 56.1
8 Mozambique 55.9
9 Uganda 54.1
10 Burkina Faso 51.9
11 India 50.0
12 Ethiopia 49.1
13 Liberia 48.4
13 Yemen 48.4
15 Cameroon 47.2
16 Eritrea 47.0
17 Malawi 46.9
18 Nicaragua 43.3
18 Nigeria 43.3
20 Zambia 42.1 Source: ICRW 2007

The Will To Learn And To Succeed

"I'd spend all day at school not knowing what the teachers were talking about -- Shakespeare and essays -- and then I'd go home and try to find out on the Internet what an essay is."
"I don't think I can say I made it. I can say we made it. I feel this graduation diploma, this ceremony, belongs to us, not to me We worked as a chain to get here ... No one ever turned me down when I needed help. No one ever shut the door."
"I will keep my father in mind for sure because he wanted to see this, but his spirit, his love, is still with me. I'll also be thinking about all those girls who don't have the same opportunity I have: It's quite hard when you want something and can't accomplish it. I know I'm one of the luckiest."
Roya Shams, Afghan schoolgirl, Ottawa

Roya Shams will attend U of O next year on a full scholarship.
Wayne Cuddington / Ottawa Citizen

"I feel there's a lot of her that is trying to do her father proud, that his death was not in vain, that she's going to make a difference in this world. So she's intense ... She has a higher calling."
"To take a student like Roya, with a limited education, and to make it happen [schooling in Canada] was a huge task -- but that's the commitment we made."
"I think we've learned a lot with Roya about what we're capable of; I think Roya showed us all how you can be successful by being persistent against all odds."
Padme Raina, assistant director of boarding admissions, Ashbury College, Ottawa

She's a feisty little thing. She will stand up for what she believes in and can be extremely stubborn, but it's all for a good cause. You have to admire how far she's come in the time she's been with us."
"I was able to support her through some of those tough times when she missed home and was still grieving for her father, or wasn't sleeping well.  She would have nightmares, reliving Kandahar."
"It has been a long journey and it has been an eye opener for a lot of us, but I think she's done herself proud."
Tui Noonan, nurse, Ashbury College

The entire world knows the details of Malala Yousafzai's entry into the conscience of those who feel that girls and women should have equal status in any society. Malala, on her way home from school one day, was singled out by Pakistan's Taliban to be destroyed, for her voice and her activism on behalf of girls entitled to an education offended their Islamist sensibilities. Malala had a strong-minded father who encouraged her sense of entitlement and wanted an education for his daughter. Malala has written a book detailing the experiences of her young life, and she was honoured by the Nobel Committee as a Laureate.

Perhaps Roya Shams is on her way to achieving similar greatness in her determination to make something of herself and her aspiration to become a voice and a motivating pendulum for change. Heading for university in the fall through the award of a full scholarship at University of Ottawa, she plans to study international development. Her goal is to pursue a degree in international law to lend herself to the fight to ensure that girls and women will no longer be denied their human rights. "Before, I had the vision and no tools. Now, I have the vision and the tools", she has stated.

Roya's father worked hard to see that his wife and daughters were educated. Like Malala's father, he felt that girls and women were equal in value to boys and men, and should be treated accordingly, given full opportunities to meet their destiny through providing them with the most basic of human rights and entitlements. Roya's father's attitude did not reflect that of the average Afghan male, but in time that may change, and Roya plans to be an agent for that change. Her father, a police commander, was murdered by the Taliban, and Roya might have been next in line for the same treatment.

A reporter on world affairs, journalist Paul Watson, took steps to bring her to Canada, with the assistance of Michael Cooke, editor of the newspaper that Mr. Watson worked for. Ashbury College, a private boarding school, offered a bursary for Roya, and to place her within their student body. The very sparsely basic English she had learned in Afghanistan barely served her academically, so she was exposed to an intensive language support protocol to enable her to gain the confidence due her, and to achiever the level of scholarship required to graduate.

Roya struggled to live within a new culture unlike her own. She lived with New Zealander Tui Noonan during the school year. Dealing with homesickness, sleepless nights and mourning for her father took its toll on the young girl. To further assist the Afghan teen on her trajectory toward her future, a fund was set up, administered by Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan, which collects donations to pay for Roya's education and living expenses in Canada.

A tribute to her fighting spirit determined to surmount all odds, and to the father who envisioned another kind of life entirely for his daughter.

A New Era Dawns in Afghanistan

"I don't do politics. [I am] a counsellor ... a listening post."
"I seem to have answered a need that was there. I think previous first ladies were not accessible. And I am accessible."
"What I've said from the beginning is that I am going to try to help all the vulnerable populations in Afghanistan -- and to a certain extent that's the majority of Afghanistan."
"One of my roles is to tell the world that they are very strong women [Afghan women] indeed, living in very challenging conditions, showing a lot of resilience, a lot of resourcefulness, and that they need to be recognized for that, not for their weakness, their alleged weakness."
"The whole fight to reduce violence against women is within the fight of reducing (all) violence, period. It is within the process of trying to bring back peace to this country."
Rula Ghani, Afghan First Lady

Afghan presidential candidate Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, right and his wife Rula Ghani, left, attend a campaign rally for women on the occasion of the International Women's Day in Kabul, Afghanistan, Wednesday, March, 9, 2014. Ten Afghan presidential candidates are campaigning in the presidential election scheduled for April. (AP Photo/Massoud Hossaini)

The wife of President Ashraf Ghani is not presenting herself within her country as would a typical Afghan woman, a quiet, unseen and unnecessarily modest woman never to be seen in public. Her husband, President Ghani  took the unusual step of introducing his wife to the public, both internal and external, during his inaugural speech eight months ago. Since then Rula Ghani has attended public events beside her husband.

Although she steers clear of politics, leaving that to her husband, a man whom Afghans in a spirit of hope and renewal elected in a free democratic vote despite threats from the Taliban and grumbles from the Islamist orthodox, she speaks before audiences on topics relating to current issues. She also listens, carefully, to what people have to say. She receives them in a meeting room, enabling ordinary Afghans to air their grievances and problems, seeking her advice.

Her predecessor, wife of Hamid Karzai, was spoken of as the "invisible first lady". Not that invisibility of 'first ladies' of Islamic presidents is unusual. Zinat Quraishi Karzai once spoke her belief in a rare interview that the time had not yet arrived in Afghanistan when its people were prepared to accept the presence of a first lady alongside her presidential husband.

In this Monday, May 25 photo, Afghan first lady Rula Ghani speaks during an interview with The Associated Press at the presidential palace in Kabul. (AP)

Political antagonists of her husband's presidency claimed that neither Rula Ghani nor her children were Afghan or Muslim and as such unacceptable to the people of Afghanistan. She had been quoted as expressing her approval of France's ban on the burqa or the niqab in public. That occasioned a ferocious backlash from both conservative Islamists and religious figures in the country.

Lebanese by birth, but Afghan by ethnic heritage, she speaks fluent English, French, Arabic and Dari. She was brought up in a Christian family, meeting her future husband at a university in Beirut. Upon marriage, they moved to the United States and lived there for 30 years where she studied journalism at Columbia University and had two children. Their daughter is an artist in Brooklyn, their son an economist living in the U.S.

They are Afghans, but they are also cosmopolitan in their nature, experience and outlook, a combination that the backward country badly needs to help in the process of  bringing it into the 21st Century. In the aftermath of 30 years of war, the society that was primitive in many ways had also become brutalized. And in such societies women are the most vulnerable among the population.

The "horrible, barbaric tragedy" of Farkhunda, a young Islamic scholar who was beaten to death at a Kabul shrine by a mob of men after being accused of burning a Koran, horrified her. Four defendants were sentenced to death and eight of them to 16 years in prison over that atrocity. Eleven police were charged with dereliction of duty for not intervening to prevent the death of the young woman, their sentence one year in jail.

Afghan protesters demand justice for Farkhunda, the woman beaten to death by a mob in Kabul in March. Photograph: Hedayatullah Amid/EPA

The case, said Rula Ghani has "shaken the nation". Its barbarism, and the fact that among the crowd of hundreds of men no one intervened to stop the mutilation and murder of a defenceless young woman on a rumour of having defiled the Islamic holy book "really opened up the eyes of people ... we don't want to live in a society in which violence is the rule", she said in her calm way.

Changing the Gender-Violence Culture

"We hope that the symposium can help put a very serious problem in a perspective that doesn't demonize men in general and does recognize that there have been undeniable improvements in male-female relationships."
"Noting that the rate has been decreasing is not the same as claiming that sexual violence and coercion are not serious and extensive problems."
"In many places and settings there is still an unacceptably high level of violence against women [and] there are some men who take advantage of women's new freedom of movement and action, using it as an opportunity or excuse for rape or other exploitative behaviour."
"On campuses this often takes the form of having sex with a woman who is clearly incapacitated -- or actively working to incapacitate her."
"While none of these papers offers definitive answers to the complex and multi-faceted issues involved in understanding and preventing inter-personal violence, we hope that the information they provide and the need they demonstrate for more reliable data-gathering [will help]."
Stephanie Coontz, director of research and education, Council on Contemporary Families, U.S.

Canadian Women's Foundation

Academics across the United States have contributed to a new American analysis through a collection of papers from the Council on Contemporary Families, an organization sharing academic research on families with the public to complete a National Crime Victimization Survey which concludes that similar to the diminishing of the overall crime rate, instances of intimate partner violence have been in decline in the last two decades nationwide. Similarly, the finding is that rape and forcible sexual assaults have also been in decline since the 1970s.

Many, receiving this information scoff at its conclusions, at the very least view it with a healthy dose of skepticism, given the recent revelations emanating from Britain, from the United States and Canada of high-profile celebrities being involved in sexual predation and violence against women and children related to sexual proclivities Those who are knowledgeable about the universality and prevalence of intimate partner violence and the seemingly growing incidence of male predation even among the young of high school and post-secondary age point out that many such incidents are simply not reported.

1. Justice Department, National Crime Victimization Survey: 2008-2012
2. FBI, Uniform Crime Reports, Arrest Data: 2006-2010
3. FBI, Uniform Crime Reports, Offenses Cleared Data: 2006-2010
4. Department of Justice, Felony Defendents in Large Urban Counties: 2009
5. Department of Justice, Felony Defendents in Large Urban Counties: 2009

Police-reported sexual assault in Canada too has been seen to have declined by four percent in 2013. The decline was among those sexual assaults reported to police falling into the category of "Level 1" (Level 1 involves minor physical injuries or no injuries to the victim), while reports of aggravated sexual assault [level 3] rose by nine percent between 2012 and 2013. Of sexual assaults committed against Canadians over the age of 15, according to a document produced by Statistics Canada, 88 percent are not reported to police.

Six percent of Canadian women self-reported sexual assault in 2009 according to StatsCan's General Social Survey on Victimization, thought of as the best self-reported source government has available in tracking this type of abuse. In the United States, as in Canada, campus sexual assault remains a serious issue with between 14 percent and 25 percent of college women having been forcibly raped or assaulted. Another analysis revealed alarmingly that women not in higher education are more at risk; 21 percent of non-college-educated women suffer domestic violence in comparison to 13 percent in university.

Yet the conclusion reached by the survey results indicates that violence between married and common-law American couples has declined, even while the papers continue to consider sexual assault prevalence remains a serious problem. The government of Ontario's #WhoWillYouHelp bystander public-service campaign has helped to highlight a campaign of awareness of sexual exploitation, emphasizing that it's everyone's business to be involved in combating the societal menace that it represents.

The research also spotlights the obvious, that in lower-income, lower-education communities a higher "tolerance for violence" exists, with a concomitant slower shift toward progressive ideas of what constitutes masculinity. Economic stress is also pointed out, predictably, as a major concern, along with the fact that there are few societal institutional supports to combat intimate violence. It is  hoped, however, that the release of the data "will generate a more nuanced discussion of sexual violence", stated Stephanie Coontz, acknowledged as one of the top family historians in the U.S.

Genetic Gender Anomalies

"The way that we took care of things in the past ... where there was a fair amount of secrecy, where there was surgery done in the infant state, and potentially irreversible surgery, is probably not the best way to go about things."
Dr. Earl Cheng, chief, development disorders program, Anne & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital, Chicago

"There was some angst about getting surgery done when she was an infant. I wouldn't let anyone babysit for her or change her diapers, other than my mom."
Chicago mother of 8-year-old intersex child

Shutterstock/Evgeny Atamanenko

The delighted, anxious parents of a newborn want to have assurances from the medical team assisting in the birth that their miracle-of-nature is sound and healthy, that everything is 'normal', above all. The burden of fear of the unknown, of the pain of imagining the difficulties that lie ahead for their offspring if they are somehow different constitutionally, physically, mentally, than expected, can incapacitate parents' nurturing skills and create an aura of panic.

And what was commonly the reaction to the discovery that a child's sexual organs were not 'normal', but might present confusingly as a bit of each gender not necessarily reflective of the child's gender-specific presentation, once a Century earlier, would have resulted in immediate, remedial surgery to remove the inappropriate genitals. This would be of comfort to parents who wanted their child to be whole and completely dedicated physically to the obvious gender role.

Except that as usual when humankind often seeks to remedy nature's occasional errors, things might have been more complicated than the response seen as a cosmetic remedy. During the era of dawning surgical techniques to correct any ambiguity over the correct genitals, parents were encouraged to have their infants undergo 'corrective' surgery, and then focus on raising them in a manner consonant with their obviously visible gender.

Cruelly, circus sideshows satisfied public curiosity over these natural anomalies reflecting either nature's sense of humour or cruel fate, by featuring people whose intersex characteristics represented an unending source of amazement and even amusement to a public fascinated by any and all human characteristics out of the ordinary.

Now, in a more sensitively enlightened era, such surgeries are no longer necessarily recommended, with U.S. and European medical specialists advocating against such emergency-responsive surgeries. The situation of intersex conditions is weighted with emotion and with controversy. Even so, some families remain convinced that early surgery will correct any future uncertainties; their children will not resemble freaks of nature.

At the Chicago hospital where Dr. Cheng practices, his program represents one of a number nationwide, using the professional expertise of specialist teams that include surgeons, hormone experts, genetic counsellors, psychologists and ethicists. Advice from such teams help families to consider options, including whether surgery is even required for their child.

Intersex conditions are not to be confused with gender identity issues. Gender orientation relates to someone's identification as either male or female, or not (androgyny), despite their appearance and their genitalia specific to their appearance. Whereas the intersex condition involves anatomy where some children may have typical male or female chromosomes affected by genetic anomalies and hormonal difficulties from the womb onward.

Some children end up having genitals that resemble those of the opposite sex, while others may have a male-female combination of sex chromosomes and resulting reproductive organs. Over one in a thousand newborns may present within the spectrum of intersex conditions reflected by mildly atypical genitals, rising to one in five thousand with more obvious instances of the gender anomaly.

The child whose mother spoke of protecting her from the curiosity of others had an intersex condition, congenital adrenal hyperplasia, resulting in male appearance genitals involving overproduction of male hormones, and which could actually become deadly without the initiation of lifelong hormone treatment. Another individual, now an adult, who had testes inside her abdomen and male chromosomes at birth, has androgen insensitivity syndrome.

Her undescended testes were removed in infancy as a preventive in developing cancer. The prevailing opinion in the medical community now is that some children instead of undergoing surgery to remove the secondary genitals, should rather have their condition monitored. The young woman with the undescended testes was born without a uterus and with a partial vagina.

She struggled with depression until meeting other young intersex adults who have learned to live with equanimity with their physical differences from what is normal. Now she has renamed herself, as Pidgeon Pagonis and sees no need to identify herself as female or male. Her work revolves around her profession as an artist, and as an intersex activist spurning surgeries.

"Take them home and love them ... just the way they are", she advises parents with intersex infants.

The Liberation of Souls

The Taliban represent an outgrowth of Wahaabi Islam, a strict, fundamentalist view of Islam that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia successfully proliferated through its funding of madrassas through its oil riches and its fierce dedication to their brand of unforgivingly-Islamist salafism. Other fundamentalist jihadi groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, Boko Haram, Hamas and al Shabaab also reflect Wahaabi Islamism.

Just as in Saudi Arabia women may not venture into the public arena other than in the company of a male family member, and even then, fully veiled and body-concealed; may not drive a car; may not travel without a husband's or father's permission, may not vote, may not be in the presence of a male outside the family unit, and other massive indignities as fully mature independent-minded individuals, the women of Afghanistan had been forbidden to gather for celebrations or parties, work for a living, listen to music, dance, along with all the above-mentioned strictures imposed on them by a clearly misogynistic society.


Under the Taliban women could not be medically treated by a male physician. And nor were women permitted to have treatment in a hospital that catered to men; they had to have their own under-funded hospital. Moreover, the women who catered to them in the health professions had to themselves -- even surgeons conducting operations -- be fully burka-clad.

Under the post-Taliban Afghan government of Hamid Karzai, a demand by Shia Muslim Afghans that a law be promulgated whereby women's role would be defined in a marriage as "readiness for sex and not leaving the house without the husband's permission"; in effect the men would have "their sharia rights" under Islamic law, and women under that law would effectively be pawns of a society whose Medieval-era enslavement of women the former president enshrined into law.





There is now a new government and a new president, but women's rights in Afghanistan have not even begun to see the light of day. They remain subordinated to men, denied fundamental human rights. They cannot even be seen at a gravesite to grieve, let alone have the right to drive, vote or run for political office. But they can now vote. Even so, in 2011 Afghanistan was singled out by a study undertaken by the Thomson-Reuters Foundation as the worst place in the world for women in recognition of high violence levels, poor health care and poverty.

None of these constraints stops some Afghan women from excelling in professions which in the previous decades have been off limits to women. Even though however, lip service is paid by the government to women's rights, a crowd of men visiting the Shah-Do Shamshira mosque in downtown Kabul became a ravening mob out for blood in mid-March as they beat and stomped a student of Islam, Farkhunda, 28 years of age, to death on the basis of a rumour spread by a mosque cleric that she had burned a Koran. She was, in fact, a Koranic scholar, teaching Islam to other women.

Afghan women's rights activists carry the coffin of Farkhunda during her funeral in Kabul Photo: AP Photo/Massoud Hossain

And she had expressed her outrage at the fact that mosque clerics were predatory money-grubbers, convincing poor women they must pay them for services. It was her outspokenness that led to her horrible death shown in photographs and videos of the rampage that ended with the young woman run over by a truck, dumped on the banks of the Kabul River and then lighted on fire. Her beautiful face bruised and ravaged, her body broken and mangled in death enraged Afghan women.

Women who are outstanding Afghan professionals from the fields of activism, journalism, sociology, theatre, photography, medicine, political science, gathered to implore Farkhunda's family to allow them the honour of bearing her simple wooden coffin to the cemetery where she was to be buried, and the family acceded to their request, a cultural, social anomaly. Amid mass protests at the horrible assault against the young women and the fact that not one man moved a finger to save her, and nor did Afghan police make an effort to extract her from the rampaging male mob, her coffin was carried in dignity and honour to her final resting place.

"I was just  crying. It was a long trek and I injured myself but all my energy was focused on giving Farkhunda a respectable burial. It was the first time I realized my real power and told myself that I'm breaking the boundaries of tradition", said Yeayish, a medical student who along with other outraged women carried the coffin to the Pansad Family Cemetery in Kabul, stopping traffic as they snaked through the streets.

And then, a cleric appeared at the burial site at the cemetery, a man named Mohammad Ayaz Nianzi.

His statement had been recorded on video before the funeral in support of the attackers of the woman being buried. That any woman desecrating a Koran deserved to die. The woman who had managed the event, gathering others to lend themselves to honouring the dead young Koranic scholar shouted at him: "You are not allowed to do the janaza, the funeral prayer Leave!"

University Rape 101

"It's the last thing that colleges and universities want to do is publish the fact that this happens. They don't want to be known as the 'rape school'."
"Every time we did an interview, we couldn't believe we were essentially hearing the same story over and over. Not only the assault and that people were targeted by predators, but also so often the way that the university or college responded."
"In the Q&As following the film [The Invisible War], students would start by talking about rape in the military but then would move very quickly to talking about rape on college campuses. We were kind of taken aback by this. We knew it was a problem, but we didn't know it was bubbling up like that. And then we started getting emails and letters from people saying, 'I was assaulted. Can you please make a film'."
"Sadly, it wasn't difficult to find survivors. The next step of deciding to come forward for many people was very difficult because the last time they came forward, they had been shut down."
"You have to look at the statistics. Only 2% to 8% of reported sexual assaults are false. So in most cases, when people come forward, they're telling the truth. The best way to respond to people when they're reporting a sexual assault is to believe them, because if you don't believe them, you're silencing them."
"I'm still shocked that this film had to be made in 2015. That it wasn't made one, two, three, four decades ago. When you talk to these survivors, sometimes they're 18, 19, they're just barely adults. And they have the courage to take on their institutions, to join with others and to create this national debate. But it shouldn't just be on students. To create a safe environment at colleges, that should be on everyone."
Kirby Dick, director, The Hunting Ground

The public, reading about the mass rapes in Darfur, is horrified. But that's Sudan for you, where a murderously repressive Muslim government steeped in the culture of misogyny of the Koran sends out the Janjaweed to kill and rape. And what can you expect of an oppressive kingdom like that of Saudi Arabia where their brand of Islam mitigates against the very thought that women could ever venture out into public without being covered head-to-toe in stifling, black tents. Oh of course, count in Afghanistan and Pakistan while we're at it.

All right, Somalia too. And let's not forget India where women are stalked and preyed upon, not only women but girls particularly if they're low-caste; raped, tortured, murdered with impunity. Rape, actually, is used as a weapon of war as we've been advised time and again in explanations around mass rape taking place in the Democratic Republic of Congo; not only by the insurgents of course, but by the DRC military. But then, look at how German women suffered when the Russian army moved in to Berlin after WWII.

In the West, it's different, right? In Western democracies dedicated to life and liberty and the inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness, predation of women won't occur because of the universal respect in which women are held in those societies who celebrate motherhood and apple pie. In our feverish imaginations, at any rate. Duke University in the U.S. stands out as a case in point. Where, when female students approach administrative services their complaints are overlooked, discarded, and the women silenced.



Effectively institutionalizing rape, since there is no penalty for it, only the blind eye of indifference. When Kirby Dick and producer Amy Ziering put together their documentary The Invisible War, about the prevalence of rape in the American military, they never dreamed that what happens in the military happens also to a very similar degree in the colleges and universities of their country. And what occurs in the United States happens as well in Canada.

And doubtless in equal measure in all Western societies; little spoken of, our own wretched secret, spoken of in hushed tones of outrage on the one hand, shoulder-shrugging on the other. Where are all the mothers teaching their sons the basics of a societal convention where respect for others is not only customary but mandatory in a civil society? Are they the ones raising sons who witness their fathers actively abusing their mothers?

In their latest documentary on university/college rape culture, Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering zero in on the anguish of young women and campus assaults. Of those young women approaching school authorities with trust, or campus police, and instead of being supported and the rapists apprehended and charged, the women are blamed, neglected and their stories shunted aside. Of course if there are no penalties the rapes simply continue; good fun!

The director/producer team posit there is a financial disincentive to the universities to pursuing the issue.

They interviewed 70 women on camera for their documentary, half the number they spoke with after the women had experienced sexual assault on various campuses. They spoke as well with university administrators, police officers, professional athletes and one man who had been a rapist, the only one of many they had approached for an interview. The result was a damning picture of entitlement, resignation and appalling disinterest.

What they discovered in their interviews and through the collection of an astonishing amount of evidence was the wholesale discrediting of the women coming forward to college administrators with their complaints. In the documentary, two principals, Andea Pino and Annie Clark are highlighted, two women who lodged a Title IX complaint against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2013 for the manner in which they responded to sexual assault cases on campus.

"Our first shoot was with them. They had just filed their complaint, and were just starting to talk about it as a national problem. We thought, this is amazing, let's follow this. We thought they might file two or three more complaints; we didn't think they'd end up in the White House. I think it's one of the things that makes the film kind of exciting, to see these students banding together and taking on their institutions, it's quite something", explained Kirby Dick.

The two women have made a full-time campaign of their focus, time and energy to touring the country in support of campus-incidence sexual assault victims. They aim their attention at aiding students at other schools, using their own experience to help them file complaints against their colleges and universities. When the year 2014 concluded, they had been responsible for enabling and encouraging the lodging of no fewer than 96 Title IX complaints.

If nothing of substance happens to remediate the situation, says Mr. Dick, over ten thousand rapes will take place on American university campuses in 2015.

Life Experiences of Aboriginal Girls

"We must all stand together to condemn these senseless acts of violence, particularly by our own people. We must stop hurting one another, we must end the pattern."
Cameron Alexis, AFN [Assembly of First Nations] Regional Chief, Alberta

"They're pretty dark [her pencil sketches]. I started drawing because it helped me express ,my feelings. It's like an escape from the reality, I guess."
"The world needs more creative people that are my age. We are the future."
"I actually had to go hide in someone's yard because this car was following me. [I waited there for] ten minutes until another person down the street went out to  start their vehicle."
"I was thinking of my parents. They didn't know I went out, I had wanted to surprise them."
"It's like my entire life became this horror movie and I'm just waiting to be kidnapped or murdered. I'm 16 years old and no aboriginal girl should ever stress over things like that."
Faith, 16 

"I can't avoid any street because any street I'm on, I get followed."
"I had been having a few issues while walking place to place during the night in the Maples, where I live. I would be getting followed and harassed by people who I don't even know, which is very disturbing to me because I haven't done anything wrong to make them feel the way they feel about me."
"A man in a white car pulled up beside me and a friend while the police drove right past us and didn't do anything, even though the police pulled into the parking lot in front of us. The man saw the cop car and drove off, but [it upset me] that the police didn't take any action or find anything suspicious or notice a car pulled up beside two young girls on the road where there is no parking zone."
"Now, ever since this happened, I have been having problems with going places during the day or night because of what I have been seeing on the news about all these young teenage aboriginal girls being murdered and missing."
"I now carry a pocket knife with me for protection."
Carolee, age 16

"I was at a Halloween party and I didn't notice I put my phone on vibrate and I had seven missed calls from my grandma and my uncle."
"If I ever drank, I'd probably get yelled at and grounded. I'm from a really tough family."
"Winnipeg is known for the most murders and the most drunk people. There's so much bad people here."
Liberty, age 15

"School is where I love to be. I feel cool. I walk into the hallways and everyone moves all at the same time, I just walk through the middle. It's like they all go 'phssh!'"
"I don't like being at home. When I was two or three, my grandma took me home from the hospital. My mother was too young to take care of me. She was 17 when she had me. I lived with my grandma for the first few years, and my mom and my dad were kind of there."
"I was supposed to see her [favourite cousin] the day before she was murdered. I kind of just held it together throughout the day [at school]. I don't know exactly what happened. I just know she was murdered in her house. It kind of makes me sad and scared. Whoever did it could still be out there killing more people."
"I don't like talking [about any missing or murdered women]. It's hard for me. I'm sensitive in a lot of ways -- I have sensitive skin, sensitive eyes, sensitive ears."
"I don't feel safe anymore. And I worry about my younger siblings. If anything ever happened, I wouldn't be able to live with not having them with me."
"I want to live in a very big house and get married."
Angel, age 16

"The most important person in my life is my girlfriend, Chantal. She's my fulfilment, my happiness and the comfort of home to me -- I would do anything to prevent something bad from happening [to her]."
"I thought it was bad and wrong of me to think of even kissing a girl or liking one. So I didn't acknowledge it very much. [It was] a hard time for me. My parents weren't accepting of it. They would joke around ... or give me dirty looks. They don't buy me clothes -- just sweaters and shoes - because I dress like a boy."
"She [Chantal] buses over after school and [we] just chill -- watch movies, eat or go skating or [go on] walks or to see our friends. Sometimes we join youth programs together."
"I send [Chantal] home every night with a knife. I'm always worried, sitting on my bed waiting for her message, telling me she's home, knowing she's walking to and from the bus stop alone, and unaware of what could happen to her."
"[Mainly], my dream is to eventually gain happiness in myself [and be] confident. And have a family with a beautiful girl."
Taylor, age 16


These are teen-agers like any other girls of their age, with many of the same self-absorbed concerns and hopes for their future, trying to find comfort and feel their way around the world of emerging adulthood, but they are teens with a heritage of First Nations cultures within Canada. And so, they have a very special burden; that of discrimination emanating from non-natives who feel superior to those of aboriginal ancestry, even while that aboriginal ancestry is a matter of justifiable pride to the girls.

Their background as First Nations children is also that of familial dysfunction, of drug addiction and alcoholism, of violence against women, of unemployment, of runaway children living on the streets of Winnipeg, plying the trades to enable themselves to live. It is a situation where aboriginals living on reserves in often-remote, inaccessible areas of the country are poverty stricken, and dependent on government handouts to enable their existence. Above all, it is a history of aggravated disrespect, and grudging negotiations between tribal leaders and governments.

Because of the rampant racism they know surrounds their ancestry and their culture, the girls are wary. Because of the violence that many have experienced, not necessarily first-hand, sometimes anecdotally, sometimes through extended family, they are hyper-aware of personal safety and the gloom of bad things happening to others, hoping to avoid having them happen to them. They are meeting as a group in a classroom at Winnipeg's Maples Collegiate Institute.

There are a dozen girls, aged between 15 and 19, meeting to discuss issues of importance to them. And they're attending a four-day workshop initiated and put on by a number of concerned social groups to explore their attitudes and apprehensions, aspirations and experiences. These are not aboriginal girls who are homeless and bypassing an education. These girls mostly do very well at their academic studies and plan to further their education.

They live in a neighbourhood of Winnipeg, a suburb where average family income is slightly higher than the city's median income, where the streets have modest bungalows and the school they attend supports indigenous culture. Each of them has experienced situations few non-Native girls have. Though for many young girls from other backgrounds  some of their experiences would be familiar. Some have been bounced from home to home, displaced from reserves, suffer some degree of depression anxiety, eating disorders.

And they talk about lurking dangers on Winnipeg's streets. Where aboriginal women are targeted by strangers. There's a story going the rounds of a back van driving around "kidnapping girls/women for sex, then dumping their bodies." One girl states, "It's not so much a coincidence. I think it's a plan."  But, in fact, it's an urban legend of sorts, there is no black van, there are no girls being kidnapped for sex, their bodies dumped, according to police.

Little wonder, though, that the girls speak of these things, for they do happen, as thankfully isolated, but horrific events and it is aboriginal girls that are targeted, sure enough. The girls taking part in the workshop are usually mute about these things, not sharing them with family members, nor with other girls their age, let alone teachers, or journalists, since it isn't a pleasant subject for them. But it does describe their lives.

Protecting Vulnerable Women

"It's like a little bodyguard in my pocket. It preserves the victim. It saves us."
"Once I realized that was all in response to my alarm [police response to alarm], I had mixed emotions. Relief and comfort knowing that's how seriously they take the matter, but also a bit of terror realizing that it's this serious."
Janet [last name withheld], Ottawa

"I'm going to go out in style. I'm going to go out big."
"I'm going to take people down with me. I haven't decided if you will be the person I take down with me."
Janet's ex-husband

"If the accused put her in the car and went on the 417 [highway], it will track her."
"They have a live eye on her so she can be intercepted by police."
Lisa Warriner, executive director, Victims Services of Hastings, Prince Edward, Lennox and Addington County

"The hope was that if we were to provide them with that quick access to services and mitigate those barriers they [abusers] were facing, they would be less likely to re-offend."

Traci Bowen, team leader, Ottawa police victim crisis unit

"It resonates not only for me but for our community."
"Far too many women have died or have been injured through domestic violence."
Chief Charles Bordeleau, Ottawa Police Services

Janet wears an alarm device especially designed to be used by women who are in danger of domestic or spousal violence She began wearing it three years ago. Wearing the device gave her the confidence to leave her home, to resume a normal life. She felt comfortable in going out with her children, knowing that with the touch of a button police would respond swiftly. She was, in fact, a pioneer in the use of the mobile tracking device; the first in Ontario to use one.

At the present time there are about 150 trackers being used across the province.There is now provincial funding for emergency cellphones in calling 911. In Janet's experience, her husband was twice arrested after their separation. First it was for criminal harassment, uttering death threats and stalking. On the second occasion he was charged with criminal harassment and breach of probation. Janet is thankful police are at her back, thanks to the alarm system.

And, as it happens, Janet's former husband was in fact a policeman.

Soon after their separation her ex-husband stalked her and their children at a public park. His intention was, he informed her, to say goodbye. And that's when he expressed the threat that threw her into a panic. The moment he drove off she dropped the children over to a friend's home, and visited the police. The mobile tracking program that helped Janet was initiated by the Victims Services of Hastings, Prince Edward, Lennox and Addington County.

Even the Ottawa Humane Society is called upon on occasion when women are considering separating from an abusive intimate relationship. There are times when companion pets' lives are in danger at the hands of a vindictive abuser. Women are as reluctant to leave an intimate partner when there are animals involved, as they are when there are children in the picture. A program was put together by the Ottawa Humane Society to hold animals in trust until such time as a woman can retrieve them.

The Ontario Veterinary Medical Association has a very similar program they call SafePet, established in 2003 where women are enabled to drop off their animals at a local veterinary clinic. The association claims that 48 percent of women, because of concerns over a pet's welfare, delayed leaving an abusive relationship.

There is also an active program to help the men who have been charged with domestic violence. Their needs are assessed, taking into account housing, financial matters and emotional counselling. Donna Watson-Elliott, who manages the Ottawa police victim crisis unit says her office tracked 86 domestic violence cases early in the year to discover that of the total, ten men had accepted assistance and had been referred to New Directions, a program set up for abusers.

A criminology professor at the University of Ottawa, Holly Johnson, analyzes data from domestic violence cases as well as data from an online survey of survivors taking into account race, religion, sexual orientation, living situation, eduction, occupation, income and the kind of violence experienced to determine how best police should respond. Nancy Worsfold, executive director of Crime Prevention Ottawa leads a subcommittee examining how domestic violence can be prevented.

Early education was pinpointed as an effective means of teaching youth about violence against women. Hoping to prevent dating violence, in 2006 Ottawa schools added a curriculum section on developing healthy relationships to grades 7 to 9 physical education courses. But in teaching mutual respect between the genders, there is nothing quite as effective as a child observing the interaction and affection between soundly-functioning parents.

Casual Relations, Casual Sex, Casual Future

"It's the type of thing that I tend to get equal volumes of hate-mail and love-mail, so you know you struck a chord."
"I see modern women, so many of them who are realizing that cohabitation and casual sex is what's making them feel subordinate and desperate and losing their identity."
"I think this bill of goods that we've been sold as women -- that we should be having uncommitted sex, that we should be living together -- it's not working out for a lot of women."
"What I'm trying to do is get people to think about their life choice as women, and to see that these trends of casual sex, of cohabiting, these are pretty new in terms of dating norms. It has only been in the last 30 or 40 years that these have become commonplace, and I think it's a failed social experiment, frankly."
"I noticed such a profound difference between couples who had legally married and who had made that commitment. Even if that marriage fell apart, they worked a lot harder to try and keep it together -- they were in that commitment sort of head space."
"People who cohabit, especially boyfriend/girlfriend, they just don't have that same level of commitment."
"We're reclaiming and redefining what marriage is. I don't think it's moral or immoral to be married or not, but I do think that certain lifestyle choices are more likely to make you happy and more likely to produce long-term relationships and stable family units."
Debra Macleod, couples counsellor/relationship author, Alberta

It's fairly safe to assume that the rise of common-law relationships -- or 'cohabiting' as Debra Macleod, the author of "The Modest Minx" puts it -- responded to and gained currency from the rise of feminism, the authority of women who forged a world-wide movement to express their insistence that women be regarded as and treated as equal to men in all endeavours. The era of 'free love' rose alongside feminism and the liberal-left and the movement of social libertarianism.

Anything men could do, so could women, and sometimes better, though some feminists added that women had to work twice as hard as men to achieve a similar goal, threading their way through the maze of male domination to achieve female emancipation and empowerment. If men could enjoy casual sex, well then, why not women ... alongside challenging men in professions once delegated only to males, like engineering, orchestra conducting, construction employment and the trades.



Living together as a loosely-committed couple meant men and women were progressive, forward-looking, confident enough in their status as man and woman to dispense with the usual social covenant-approval of religious- and/or state-sanctioned marriage. Rather than be twisted into legal knots by convention, men and women would be free to make their own choices; if they meant to remain together they would, if not, well the experiment of experience was the result.

Or should that rather be the experience of experiment. Trouble is, there's nothing usually so casual and throwaway as human emotional investment and expectations We can attempt to mould our feelings and reactions into a straitjacket of hanging loose and easy over intimate relationships but we cannot really leave biology and human nature out of the equation as we bound into the dim future of destiny and long-term relationships.

But perhaps, in the minds of many, long-term relationships were not the goal, but rather sequential ones, reflecting our state of being at any given time throughout life's journey. As we matured and gained experience our interests and self-absorption might dictate that we move on to taste-test what might await in another relationship offering a different experience and horizon? For those who were leery of what is implied in commitment and 'long-range', and forever-after it might have worked.



For those women who required the comfort and assurance of a companion through life's struggles and its joys and heartaches, to be taken for granted and considered dispensable might not have been the resolution to life's search for intimacy and companionship. Ms. Macleod recognizes that many women find happiness and fulfillment in cohabitation or casual sex, as she put it. Those women aside, she speaks of the multitudes for whom happiness in a common law relationship didn't eventuate.

Of her clients she speaks of women disappointed and disillusioned when they encountered indifference or behaviour bespeaking narcissism in the non-committed men who shared their lives. On the other hand, she pointed out, she had never heard male clients make any complaints relating to lack of commitment from their partners. It could be that she had far more female clients than male clients, or her conclusion might have been based on equal representation.

But it is also true that often enough men look for different satisfactions in co-habiting relationships than women do. If children are concerned in the relationship there are obvious reasons for women to want their children to plan for a permanent live-in father to help raise them. This biological need arose out of early society recognizing and impelling the family unit, after all.



Research appears to affirm the many measurable benefits in the convention of formal marriage; mental and physical both, over the relationship of cohabitation. Married pairs remain intact as a unit at higher rates than couples simply cohabiting.  Within marriage, finances are improved, providing that stable relationship for children (whom statistics point out fare less well in cohabiting households).

Research appears to point to greater happiness and higher reported levels of well-being among married as opposed to their common-law or cohabiting counterparts. Between 2006 and 2011 in Canada the number of common-law couples rose 13.9 percent, over four times the 3.1 percent rise for married couples. In the year 2011, 16.7 percent of all census families were identified as common-law, leaving married couples the predominant family structure at 67 percent.

The women's liberation ideology that held marriage to be associated with subordination of women and sexual repression, surprisingly enough has resulted in university-educated women on average 27 years of age and without children from previous relationships faring best in relation to marriage outcomes.

A 2010 report issued by the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia demonstrated that college and university graduates of both genders reported highest levels of marital happiness. Make of that what you will.