Religion and Gender-Based Violence

Model United Nations 2004

Position Paper

Committee: Status of Women

Topic: Religion and Gender-Based Violence

Country: United Kingdom

A. The United Kingdom is full of organizations that provide help to women around the world. The Women’s National Commission is the official and independent advisory body giving the views of women to the government. This organization is in charge of taking in account (by the Government) women’s points of view and needs. This also involves taking all of these opinions to a public debate. The Women’s National Commission (as well as many organizations in the UK) is aware of the problems around the world and how rights of women are violated in many ways. Since there job is to inform the government and the public, they do, and the government has taken time and money to invest in women’s well beings. But also, the UK has a group called Womankind Worldwide that is dedicated to raising the status of women around the world. They work with 20 countries in Africa, South Asia, Western Europe, Central and South America. The Womankind Worldwide organization, works to achieve an improvement in women’s lives – socially, financially, in terms of health and participation in society. Religion and gender-based violence is a very important issue for this group, which is why they created a special project (called Body Literacy) that focuses in helping women understand and confront the taboos of their society. This organization works directly with women and men internationally with the hope of transforming communities and achieving equality between women and men.

B. Organizations of this kind in the UK believe they are capable of stopping violence and creating a better world. But violence in women seems to have been forgotten (it causes more deaths in women than cancer, malaria, traffic accidents and war). That’s the reason why numerous organizations in the UK focus on helping women worldwide with diverse kinds of programs. The UK organizations develop programs to deal with women’s inequality in the planet’s poorest places to show them to make decisions in their own life for them, for their families, community and eventually to lend a hand to other women with the same problems. The importance of these kinds of programs and institutions is that they provide motivation and are able to bring a social change to the international communities. These institutions had achieved great success teaching women how to overcome the taboos that society had created in them.