USA: Peace index ignores women
The first ever index of peacefulness, the GPI, ignores violence to women and children and gives a skewed measurement of peace, reports the Christian Science Monitor
The first ever study to rank countries according to their peacefulness, the Global Peace Index (GPI), fails to consider violence against women and children, accused the Christian Science Monitor and Women?s E-News.
The study, that was launched in May 2007 by the Economist Intelligence Unit, a global research and advisory firm, ranked 121 nations according to 24 indicators of the internal and external peacefulness of nations. Military expentidure, number of external and internal wars and levels of violent crime were among the indicators used, but violence against woman and children, which often goes on within the walls of family houses and unpunished was not included.
?To put it mildly, this blind spot makes the index very inaccurate? said Rian Eisler of the Christian Science monitor. Countries known for repeated violations of human rights, according to the Csm, ranked higher than they should have, such as Egypt that was ranked 73rd even though more than 90 percent of Egyptian girls and women are reported to be subjected to genital mutilation. ?This gruesome practice causes many lifelong physical problems and claims the lives of countless women. It's a terrible form of violence, but it wasn't included in the index, otherwise Egypt would have ranked much lower? continued Eisler.
The United States ranked 96th while Bhutan, Romania and China all received better scores, even though all three are known offenders of children and women?s human rights. In China infanticide still goes on as shown by the imbalanced birth ratios while reports reveal the extent of violations in both Bhutan and Romania. In Chile, that was ranked 16th, 26 percent of women report to have suffered domestic violence at least once.
The GPI aims to measure peace as something more than the mere absence of war and the Index has been correlated against a range of social development indicators including democracy, transparency education and well-being. But by excluding violent crime to women the GPI fails to acknowledge the status of women in society, nor does it account for the un-peaceful lives lived by women and children exposed to violence.
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