Taking Women's Rights Seriously

Gordon Brown: Taking Women's Rights Seriously

The sustained degradation and subjugation of girls and women remains the world's most pervasive human rights violation.

Today, well over 100 million are 'missing' because of increased mortality from inequality and neglect and the majority of the 2.4 million victims of human trafficking, which treats people as products, are female. In its numbers and scale, the systematic discrimination outstrips even the wholesale abuses of the 18th and 19th century slave trade, which we today deplore as an obscene example of inhumanity from another era.

Yet, in supposedly civilised and enlightened times, girls and women around the world suffer unimaginable atrocities: forced marriage, rape, mutilation and death in pregnancy and childbirth. In Sierra Leone, a woman has a one in six chance of dying in childbirth in her lifetime -- a grotesque transformation of what should be the happiest time in a family's life into one of the most dangerous. Discrimination also means girls and women are more likely to be in poverty, denied schooling, deprived of health care, excluded from political and economic decision-making and die young.