In the third edition of the Global Women's Security Index, published by the United Nations, the top five countries with the highest status of women are Norway, Finland, Iceland, Denmark and Luxembourg. Living in these five countries, women do not worry about being beaten and hurt, do not worry about gender discrimination, workplace harassment, and do not worry about not having more income than men and not having higher positions than men.
So, what about the five countries with the lowest status of women? How bad the actual situation is, ordinary people may hardly imagine.
First place in the lowest female status country: Afghanistan
The status of Afghan women was also very high, and during the ten-year reign of King Ammanura in 1919, he not only broke away from British control, but also banned bad habits including forced marriage, polygamy, women's inability to go to school, and wearing veils; The queen also set up a series of women's organizations, magazines, theaters, schools, hospitals, etc., and 15 Afghan women were sent to Turkey to study, setting a precedent for Muslim women in the Middle East to receive foreign education.
However, the old-fashioned and British counterattack soon followed, the Ammanuras were forced into exile, and Afghan women were not allowed to go out on the streets alone until 1978, when they again had the right to choose their husbands and occupations.
In the four years following the withdrawal of the Soviet Union in 1992-1996, Afghanistan was transformed into a Muslim country, with the strictest prohibition, in addition to "abstinence" or "veiling women", during which hundreds of thousands of women were kidnapped, raped, beaten, enslaved, and abused, including child marriage, and in many rural mountainous areas, girls had to marry before the age of 13.
The United Nations quoted the WHO in 2011 as saying that 50% of Afghan women are under the age of marriage under 18 years old, more than 25% under 16 years old, and 15% under 15 years old, and the education level of these women is basically zero.
There is also a more dehumanizing form of "compensatory marriage": the female family of the offender is compensated to the victim's family as servants or brides. It goes without saying what kind of treatment these women will receive when they come to the victim's home with hatred.
In 2011, the first female driver in Afghanistan to obtain a legal driver's license was born, but it was not long before her license was revoked because "female driving is easy to cause onlookers and breed incidents."
In 2012, Afghanistan recorded 240 "honour killings," in which "men murder women in defense of dignity," such as women violating prohibitions, cheating, stealing, and misbehaving or dressing, were subjected to stoning (a very cruel civil punishment), knife cutting, burning, beheading, throat slitting, hanging, or hanging. Village tribes where men have the right to decide whether women live or die is not uncommon in Afghanistan.
Of the 240 cases of "honour killings", 21% of the husbands committed murders, 7% by brothers, 4% by the father, and the rest by relatives, more than 90% of such cases will not be tried, even if there is a judgment, it is difficult to actually enforce.
As of 2020, Afghanistan's national female literacy rate is only 24.2 percent, and only 21 percent of the 174,000 university students are women. Previously, Afghan women's identity cards were only the name of their father, not their own, and the birth certificate of their children was not allowed to bear the name of their mother.
A woman's divorce must be approved by her husband before she can apply, and must give a "valid reason" to be recognized by the court, while the husband does not have to do anything if he wants to divorce.
To conclude with a decree issued by the Supreme Court of Afghanistan in 1993 (original translation):
Women do not need to leave the house, and when absolutely necessary and with the consent of their husbands, they must completely cover their bodies, they must not wear beautiful, tight clothes, they cannot wear decorative accessories, they cannot spray perfume, they cannot walk the streets with their heads up, they cannot talk to strangers, they cannot talk loudly or laugh.
Second highest ranking country for women: Syria
In 2017, there was a saying in Syrian folklore that there were no young men in the country anymore, and women could only find foreign husbands through the Internet.
During a trip to Romania, I met Zainab, a 28-year-old Syrian woman, who excitedly told me: I would rather starve to death in Romania than return to Syria, which is worse than hell.
The main reason why Zainab hates his homeland so much is that the status of Women in Syria is extremely low, and women in conflict zones often face violence, sexual assault, detention, child marriage and other abuses. A 2020 human rights survey showed that 23 percent of Syrian women have been beaten three times in the past 12 months, and about 3.3 percent have been subjected to domestic violence at least once a week.
Child marriage is repeatedly banned in Syria, but as parents, poor Syrians are also involuntary, because girls may have better living conditions, a better educational environment and a safer living space after marrying out, and staying at home will not change anything. This has also led to many Syrian girls aged fourteen and fifteen carrying babies out of the home to work, and their income is the lowest in Syria, and there is no one, with an average daily income of less than $0.50.
Zainab said: Less than 30% of women over the age of 25 in Syria have received junior high school education, and a small number of women with higher education have basically run abroad, even if they marry a septuagenarian man in a developed country, it is better than starving and freezing in Syria, and they do not have to worry about being beaten and abused.
Because of the long period of civil strife, women left in Syria have only three ways out: either to silently endure the abuse that has been commonplace for hundreds of years, or to join an organization and take up a gun, and become a refugee if they can leave Syria, even if they enter a United Nations refugee camp.
Syrian women do not have the freedom to marry, the vast majority of marriages are arranged by parents, love marriage is not recognized by the inquisition, which also gave birth to a special profession - "marriage agent", they specialize in marriage procedures for Syrian youth in foreign countries, the parents of both parties who stay in Syria participate in the wedding of their children through online video, there are witnesses, lawyers, and marriage certificates on the scene.
Third highest ranking country for women: Yemen
Yemen's social structure has been recognized by major organizations and institutions as a "typical patriarchal society", and deep-rooted traditional practices (such as women are not allowed to return home during menstruation), complicated and arbitrary religious norms (women are classified as appendages), coupled with years of civil strife and weak law enforcement in Yemen, have led to only one-half" human rights for Yemeni women.
Simply put, a Yemeni woman has only half a personal status, for example, the court stipulates that "the weight of the testimony of two Yemeni women is equal to the weight of the testimony of a Yemeni man", "the court does not accept the testimony of female witnesses in cases of adultery, defamation, theft, etc."; There is also the Yemeni Ministry of Labor's regulation that "private enterprises must give priority to male or 2 men and 1 female" and so on.
Under Yemeni law, a man could marry only one wife, and both husband and wife had the right to file for divorce. But the Butteran Inquisition allows Muslim men to marry 4 wives, conditional upper-middle-class marriages to 5 to 6 without going to jail, men divorce without any reason, while women must pass the permission of the inquisition, and the winning rate is only 20%.
Is it okay not to marry a Yemeni man? Not really! Because Yemeni law stipulates that if a woman wants to marry a foreigner, she must obtain permission from her family, tribe (or village) and the state. As of 2021, no more than 100 women will be married outside the house.
In addition, the low status of Women in Yemen is also reflected in society and life, for example, "honour killings" are also prevalent in Yemen, but men who offend families and tribes are likely to disappear the next day. Yemen passed the Personal Status Act in 1994, but the maximum sentence for "honour killings" is only 1 year, and if a little bail is paid, they can be released in court.
It is worth mentioning that Yemeni men do not only discriminate against Yemeni women, but all women who enter Yemen are treated the same, such as the "women's prisons" in many cities in Yemen, where women who enter the prison must serve their sentences according to Muslim customs, even in the cell can not take off the veil and turban.
Fourth place in the lowest female status country: Pakistan
In 1988, Pakistan's first female prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, publicly stated that the status of women in Pakistan needed to be improved and that the government was willing to provide any job for women. The geographical location of the three countries near Afghanistan, Iran and India has also affected the border areas with serious folklore transmission.
Prime Minister Bhutto handled 60 per cent of rape cases and 70 per cent of "honour killings" during his term of office, but in the face of numerous child marriages, arranged marriages and inadequate law enforcement, many women still face discrimination in gender, employment, treatment, medical care and so on. For example, the ubiquitous electric tricycle, the daily rent for men is only 300 rupees, while for women is 500 rubles; On some occasions there is even a tradition of "women's seating areas", where all women are placed in the areas with the worst view.
Out of fear, Pakistani parents, fearing that their daughters will be abused and beaten after marriage, often prepare a large dowry in exchange for respect. If the man's family is superior, the dowry prepared is correspondingly more, from gold and silver jewelry to precious jewelry, from clothes and bedding to pots and pans, from mobile phones to TV refrigerators, similar to the visual sense of the man carrying a bag.
In 2019, a Pakistani film "Load wedding", which criticized arranged marriages and dowry customs, was released, and the popular comparison was even better than in the past. According to media statistics, pakistan's first marriage dowry averages more than 700,000 rubles, equivalent to 23,000 yuan, which is undoubtedly a huge expenditure for Pakistani families with a per capita monthly salary of less than 1,000 yuan, and the second marriage dowry is not two or three million rupees, and it is impossible to marry at all.
Fifth highest ranking country for women: Iraq
Iraq is one of the traditional patriarchal countries, and "honour killings", arranged marriages and child marriages were common before the 20th century, until Iraqi women were first counted in literacy data after the introduction of a free primary education system in 1957.
In 1958, Iraq declared that "women in primary education can have the right to vote", which greatly stimulated the enthusiasm of Iraqi women in education, resulting in a decline in the number of female illiteracy for many years, the female literacy rate was once close to that of men, and the status of women was constantly improving.
However, the outbreak of the two Gulf Wars set back decades in the development of Iraq's society.
In 1987, the female literacy rate in Iraq had reached 75 per cent, falling to 25 per cent in 2000, and in 2017 World Bank statistics showed that only 5 per cent of Iraqi women successfully completed high school. In contrast, the employment rate for women is perennially below 10 per cent and the salary is only 60 per cent of that of men. This, combined with the illiteracy of most females, has led to the reluctance of most Iraqi enterprises to recruit female employees, and the general reluctance of male employees to work with women.
In 2001, Amir, a United Nations ethnic researcher, called on Iraq to "reduce the insulting use of women in kurdish language" and to "separate government and religious courts" so that egregious incidents such as "honour killings" against women could be tried fairly.
Iraqi society has not responded to calls to continue to tolerate very cruel folk practices such as "genital mutilation", and from January to April 2016 alone, there were at least 534 cases of "honour killings" in Kurdish province (12,000 in 1997-2006), which were uniformly glorified as "voluntary female" or "accidental suicide".