Guardian:

Turkish police have recovered the body of a 16-year-old girl they say was buried alive by relatives in an "honor" killing carried out as punishment for talking to boys. The girl, who has been identified only by the initials MM, was found in a sitting position with her hands tied, in a two-meter hole dug under a chicken pen outside her home in Kahta, in the south-eastern province of Adiyaman. ... Media reports said the father had told relatives he was unhappy that his daughter - one of nine children - had male friends. The grandfather is said to have beaten her for having relations with the opposite sex. A postmortem examination revealed large amounts of soil in her lungs and stomach, indicating that she had been alive and conscious while being buried. Her body showed no signs of bruising.

First, let me say this: the brutalization of women and girls cuts across all religious and cultural boundaries, so this isn't just about dis-'honor' killings, though few things are more heinous than a father murdering his daughter (after dispassionately discussing it with other family members). It's about the things males do to females and will continue to do unless the outcry is loud enough that the world begins to take notice. In a December post, I made a painfully easy prediction: women would have another horrible decade. I gave a few examples. Like this:

Denis Mukwege, a Congolese gynecologist, cannot bear to listen to the stories his patients tell him anymore. Every day, 10 new women and girls who have been raped show up at his hospital. Many have been so sadistically attacked from the inside out, butchered by bayonets and assaulted with chunks of wood, that their reproductive and digestive systems are beyond repair. "We don't know why these rapes are happening, but one thing is clear," said Dr. Mukwege, who works in South Kivu Province, the epicenter of Congo's rape epidemic. "They are done to destroy women."

And this:

13-year old Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow was stoned to death in Somalia by insurgents because she was raped. Reports indicate that she was raped by three men while traveling by foot to visit her grandmother in Mogadishu. When she went to the authorities to report the crime, they accused her of adultery and sentenced her to death. Aisha was forced into a hole in a stadium of 1,000 onlookers as 50 men buried her up to the neck and cast stones at her until she died. A witness who spoke to the BBC's Today programme said she had been crying and had to be forced into a hole before the stoning, reported to have taken place in a football stadium. ... She said: 'I'm not going, I'm not going. Don't kill me, don't kill me.' "A few minutes later more than 50 men tried to stone her." The witness said people crowding round to see the execution said it was "awful".

And there's so much more. Here's a BBC story from this morning:

A wealthy British landowner has been found guilty of murdering his estranged wife. Prout's wife asked him for a divorce before she went missing...

Or this, from 2005, that uses a perfect word to describe the men who do these things:

When Amy Rezos went to meet her estranged husband to talk about a divorce, she never imagined what would happen next. When the couple separated, Chris got a hotel room. On July 2, 2004, Amy thought she was meeting him in the hotel to finalize the details of the divorce. Instead, she was walking into a carefully planned trap. As the couple argued over the custody of their two boys, Chris snapped. "I just remember seeing a look on him that I had never ever seen before in my life. It was a look ... like a monster," she said. Amy was savagely beaten. Someone in a nearby room heard the commotion and called the police. When officer Paul Lovett arrived, Chris Rezos tried to convince him that they were victims of a robbery. But Lovett didn't buy it. "I could see a woman on the floor covered in blood. The bathroom was covered in blood. I was certain she was dying. I asked her to blink once for no, twice for yes," Lovett said. As the 35-year-old woman lay near death, Lovett tried to speak to her, "I asked if your husband did this to you and blink once for no, twice for yes, and she blinked twice," he said.

I could post thousands of these and it wouldn't capture the depth and breadth of the problem. It comes down to this: there simply isn't sufficient public outrage about gender-based violence to spur political action. In the aftermath of Haiti, I asked a simple question: "If the World Can Mobilize Like This for Haiti, Why Not for Sexual Violence in Congo?"

The world's response to Haiti is fully warranted - anything less would be reprehensible. But one thing about it frustrates me: why can't we muster the same sense of urgency, the same focus, the same acceptance that other lesser activities must be temporarily set aside; why can't we mobilize as quickly and react as fiercely and forcefully when it comes to similar calamities across the globe? Say, for instance, the monstrous sexual violence in Congo? When young girls are being gang-raped with bayonets and chunks of wood, their insides ripped apart, how can the world take it in stride? There's simply no excuse for a muted response, let alone indifference. None.

Some readers said the global inaction with respect to Congo boils down to Coltan, and to some extent that's true. But the bigger problem is apathy. Nick Kristof articulates it well:

Sometimes I wish eastern Congo could suffer an earthquake or a tsunami, so that it might finally get the attention it needs. The barbaric civil war being waged here is the most lethal conflict since World War II and has claimed at least 30 times as many lives as the Haiti earthquake. Yet no humanitarian crisis generates so little attention per million corpses, or such a pathetic international response.

'Pathetic' is an understatement. Sometimes I feel like we were all born into an alternate universe, a psychotic, twisted, perverted version of what life should be. Our existence is marked by unimaginable violence, hideous acts of evil against the most innocent among us. It's like living in a perpetual horror movie. Setting aside the existential conundrum, one thing I know for certain: we can't stop jumping up and down, screaming at the top of our lungs, donating money to organizations that help women, telling our friends and families, doing everything in our power to stop these male monsters from continuing their savagery against women and girls.

On Tuesday evening, I received a short email from Mark.  The message was this:

"massive, 7.0 earthquake in Haiti. really, really devastating"

Mark is an even-tempered and measured guy and I knew that he wouldn't exaggerate the severity of the situation.

In the days since the quake struck, I've tried, like so many millions of people, to do as much as possible to raise awareness, donate money, and help the victims of the Haiti catastrophe.

I've done it because I believe it is absolutely imperative that we try our best to help all innocent living beings in need - it's truly the highest calling and perhaps our ultimate moral purpose.

The world's response to Haiti is fully warranted - anything less would be reprehensible. But one thing about it frustrates me: why can't we muster the same sense of urgency, the same focus, the same acceptance that other lesser activities must be temporarily set aside; why can't we mobilize as quickly and react as fiercely and forcefully when it comes to similar calamities across the globe? Say, for instance, the monstrous sexual violence in Congo?

When young girls are being gang-raped with bayonets and chunks of wood, their insides ripped apart, how can the world take it in stride? There's simply no excuse for a muted response, let alone indifference. None.

Are the two situations comparable? One is a natural disaster, the other is a man-made one. I don't think it makes a difference - suffering is suffering. We should act decisively and immediately in both circumstances. If anything, the man-made one is more preventable.

Is it a matter of scale? Let's look at the numbers. Estimates are very rough, but we're hearing figures as high as 50,000 dead in Haiti. Thousands more are trapped and injured. Surely, those numbers dwarf what's going on in Congo? They don't. The NYT says that "according to the UN, 27,000 sexual assaults were reported in 2006 in South Kivu Province alone, and that may be just a fraction of the total number across the country. ... brutality toward women [is] "almost normal."

Is it because the Congo situation and other nightmares like it (hunger, poverty, disease, human rights abuses, trafficking, etc.) are intractable and people - and the media - naturally lose interest when they see that they can't change things? Well, they don't seem to lose interest when it's Natalee Holloway, OJ Simpson, Michael Jackson, Laci Peterson, or any number of similar stories. Apparently, Americans can stay rapt for months and years, following every twist and turn of a crime or celebrity death. Roadblock news coverage, online buzz, and endless commentary are a given when there's another twist in one of those tales. I've seen more attention paid to the recent musical chairs played by late night comedy hosts than to some of the preventable misery taking place at this very moment here in the U.S. and around the world.

Is the lackluster reaction to the horrors in places like Congo a result of overload - there are just so many ills in the world that we only respond when shaken to action by something dramatic and unexpected like a tsunami or earthquake? That's certainly a factor, but some catastrophes are worse than others. Granted there's a sliding scale of interest and people are more inclined to worry about their own issues than the ongoing difficulties of others. But there has to be some triage, some acknowledgment that certain situations are more deserving of bold action than others. Girls and women being brutalized by the tens of thousands? That's one of those situations.

I'm realistic about the dim prospects of fixing some the world's problems. I saw enough misery and bloodshed growing up in Beirut to last a lifetime, so I know that we'll never root out evil and violence. I understand that there are complex political and social obstacles to addressing problems like Darfur and Congo. I also realize that most people on this planet have a hard enough time getting by and dealing with their own challenges. They can barely spare time or resources to protect women and children a world away. But those of us who can, MUST act with the same passion and urgency to some of the terrible things that occur around the world as we have to Haiti. And the media - traditional and online - should pay the same attention and generate the same level of intensity.

It's encouraging to see presidential statements, celebrity telethons, text message fundraising, and wall to wall media coverage of Haiti. I'd like to see the same thing for other emergencies, some of which may be occurring in slower motion, but are occurring nonetheless.

The conditions that allow for political action are popular attention and support - when the people turn away, the politicians lose interest, when they rise up, political leaders take note. Let's learn from Haiti that it's possible to do big, good things.

Cross posted at Huffington Post

Image: Flickr (Julien Harneis)

From AlertNet:

The Afghan battlefield is spreading into residential areas where more people are being killed by air strikes, car bombs and suicide attacks, according to a U.N. report published on Friday.

The U.N. Assistance Mission to Afghanistan said that 1,013 civilians were killed on the sidelines of their country's armed conflict from January to the end of June, compared to 818 in the first half of 2008 and 684 in the same period in 2007. Commenting on the report, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said it was critical that steps be taken to shield Afghan communities from fighting.

This is welcome news:

The Obama administration has opened the way for foreign women who are victims of severe domestic beatings and sexual abuse to receive asylum in the United States. The action reverses a Bush administration stance in a protracted and passionate legal battle over the possibilities for battered women to become refugees.

But one sentence caught my eye:

In addition to meeting other strict conditions for asylum, abused women will need to show that they are treated by their abuser as subordinates and little better than property, according to an immigration court filing by the administration, and that domestic abuse is widely tolerated in their country.

Are we kidding ourselves? Name a country, including the U.S., where domestic abuse isn't widely tolerated.

In the words of the WHO, "Gender-based violence, or violence against women (VAW), is a major public health and human rights problem throughout the world."

Here's a chilling video in which Keira Knightley reenacts the vicious and cowardly abuse women are subjected to on a daily basis: