Dry Tears of a Woman's Silent Cry

Every day across the globe, millions of women and girls are used, abused, controlled and exploited for religious, commercial, personal reason and/or gain. They are entrapped and trafficked into a sex industry, kept in servitude as wives or domestic workers in private homes, forced to work in exploitative conditions in factories or bonded into agricultural labor. Sustaining atrocious physical and mental violence, they are denied all basic rights and freedoms.

In many countries, the simple fact of being female still creates a heightened risk of falling into modern slavery. Unfortunately pervasive gender discrimination means that girls are marginalized, treated as second-class citizens within their communities and viewed as an economic burden by their families.

Many are forced to drop out of school early and sent to work in exploitative conditions, or are married off against their will. Women are more likely than men to seek work in unregulated and informal sectors where they are vulnerable to systematic abuse, violence and exploitation. All of these factors contribute to women and girls making up some 70% of the world's underestimated 40 million people in slavery.

According to a report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the vast majority of all human trafficking victims – some 71% – are women and girls and one third are children.

Trafficking for sexual exploitation and for forced labor remain the most prominently detected forms, but victims are also being trafficked to be used as beggars, for forced or sham marriages, benefit fraud, pornography, or the unthinkable blood and organ trade.

The last 2016 UNODC Global Report dis-aggregated data on the basis of gender and found that women and girls are usually trafficked for marriage and/or sexual slavery. Men and boys, however, are trafficked into exploitative hard labor and soldiers.

Worldwide, 29% of trafficking victims are children from Sub-Saharan Africa, Central America and Central and South East Asia, with a growing trend from war ravaged Middle East countries.

UNODC emphasized the link between armed groups and human trafficking, noting how armed groups often engage in trafficking in their territories of operation, coercing women and girls into marriages or sexual slavery, and pressing men and boys to act as forced labor or combatants.

People escaping from war and persecution are particularly vulnerable to becoming victims of trafficking, prompting the urgency of their situation does lead them to make dangerous migration decisions.

While 158 countries have criminalized human trafficking – a huge improvement over the past 13 years – the rate of convictions remains far too low, and victims rarely receive the protection and services countries are supposed to provide.

A definite need lingers for more resources to identify and assist trafficking victims and to improve the criminal justice responses to detect, investigate, and successfully prosecute cases.

The UNODC releases a report on trafficking every two years. During the last UN Summit for Refugees and Migrants in New York, it emphasized that as more people become migrants and refugees, there is a greater risk for trafficking practices, and that states must respond accordingly.

That said, domestic violence is, in many ways, the other quiet epidemic. Though in plain sight, victims are often invisible, fearfully denying their situation and hiding behind the facade of a happy home.

Statistics reveal a shocking reality. For instance, every nine seconds, a woman is assaulted or beaten, according to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. A mind-boggling one in three women (and one in four men) has been a victim of physical brutality by an intimate partner, the group also reports. That makes intimate partner violence "the single greatest cause of injury to women," per the Domestic Violence Intervention Program.

Hard to imagine the scope we're talking about? Consider this: The number of women killed by a current or former male partner added up to nearly double the soldier lives lost in war in Afghanistan and Iraq during the same 11-year time frame, The Huffington Post calculated last year.

Domestic violence is an epidemic, no matter what statistic you look at, yet as a society we often close our eyes to it. There are "millions of women and children that we know are living in violent homes every day. If we had a health issue that we knew was affecting millions of people, we'd work together to figure it out, like with what's been done to address smoking and heart disease. But because this is a 'private' issue, a 'family matter,' people don't talk about it.

The uncomfortable truth? The majority of marriages will include some violence. The Domestic Violence Intervention Program (DVIP) reports that law enforcement agencies estimate that violence will occur during the course of two-thirds of all marriages.

Occupations, income levels, urban or suburban conditions — studies show that none of these factors is an indicator of more or less incidents of domestic abuse. When it comes to racial divide, there is no difference either. "White, Black, Asian and Hispanic women all incur about the same rates of violence committed by an intimate partner," according to the DVIP. As far as pinning down which have the highest rates of domestic violence, varying criteria make a definitive ranking impossible.

Ironically, it's the incredible pervasiveness of the violence keeps people in denial. Many don't want to acknowledge it because it leads to admission of more than they want to face. They label it a lot of times as a sort of 'low-life' problem: 'It must be people who are uneducated and disadvantaged,' which is just a way to distance oneself and feel like that won't happen to people in one's class, or neighborhood. It is self-protection. But unfortunately it's everywhere and that's really hard to accept.

Women between 25 and 34 are reportedly the most vulnerable to partner violence. And while 85% of domestic abuse victims are women. Only 34% of people who are injured by intimate partners receive medical care for their injuries — and even fewer get law enforcement involved. (Just 25% of "physical assaults perpetrated against women are reported to the police annually," the National Violence Against Women Survey reveals). "I've seen women go a week with a serious injury before getting help," shares the National Center on Domestic and Sexual Violence's Deborah Tucker.

Why? Many fear triggering an attacker's anger or having a plan to flee foiled. And it's no wonder: "Women are 70 times more likely to be killed in the two weeks after leaving than at any other time during the relationship," the Domestic Violence Intervention Program reports.

This is especially true for the spouses of military and law enforcement officers. Multiple studies have found that 24-40% of army or police officer families experience domestic violence (in contrast to 10% of families in the general population). Not only are the abusers' friends and colleagues the very people victims would turn to for help, but the abuser is also trained to use a gun, which increases the risk of homicide by 500%.

And for the half of women who do manage to leave abusive partners, it's no easy feat. An estimated 98% of abused women also experience "financial abuse," in which their partner controls all of the money, and between 21% and 60% of domestic violence victims lose their jobs due to issues that their abuse caused. So they may escape — but with no income and no financial resources.

This plague perpetuates itself. Each year, millions of children are exposed to domestic violence — and of the kids exposed to it, a heartbreaking 90% are eyewitnesses, who will feel the effect of it for their entire lives.

The World Health Organization reports that globally, men who were exposed to domestic violence as children are three to four times more likely to perpetrate intimate partner violence as adults than men who did not. Young people who are living in violent homes are six times more likely to attempt suicide. An estimated half of these men choose not to perpetuate the problem or take their own lives, but they still often suffer too — in personal relationships because the adult didn't learn healthy relationships as a child ... or critically important trust and respect.

While there are laws in place about domestic violence, that's not sufficient. We haven't shifted the behaviors toward it that convey it's okay to beat up your girlfriend. In fact, almost 1 in 5 female high school students reports being physically or sexually abused by a dating partner, The Center for Women and Families has found.

The key, is changing people's attitudes by understanding that it is everybody's business — not just that of the law enforcers alone. We all have an obligation to take this on. Case and point is the shifts that our culture has seen towards smoking and recycling in recent decades, Thirty years ago, it was culturally appropriate to smoke wherever you were, at home, on the job or in public. Now, it's against the law and it's culturally inappropriate. We shifted norms and behaviors. It's the same thing with recycling. Growing up, people didn't think twice about throwing garbage out the window of a moving car on the highway. Today we've changed our behavior, our values, and people recycle. That's what needs to change with respect to domestic violence.

As a 21st Century civilization, question is: Are we not capable to solve any of this?

Food for thought!