Religions and the Abuse of Women and Girls: Digging Deeper

At the 2009 meeting of the Parliament of World Religions, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter called the worldwide abuse of girls and women the greatest unaddressed human rights crisis of our time. In the book that followed the speech, he compares sexism to the racism he witnessed in the southern United States, stating:

There is a similar system of discrimination, extending far beyond a small geographical region to the entire globe; it touches every nation, perpetuating and expanding the trafficking in human slaves, body mutilation, and even legitimized murder on a massive scale. This system is based on the presumption that men and boys are superior to women and girls.²

He states further that this problem is "largely caused by a false interpretation of carefully selected religious texts and a growing tolerance of violence and warfare, unfortunately following the example set during my lifetime by the United States."³ Carter offers a final reason for the abuse of women and girls: "There's one more basic cause that I need not mention, and that is that in general, men don't give a damn."⁴

As a feminist theologian, I was thrilled to learn that Carter joined us in recognizing religion as one of the primary causes of the abuse of women and girls. I am grateful to him for using his position as a former president and elder statesman to call attention to the role played by religions in justifying the oppression of one half of the human race. And I am very happy that he gives a damn. When Carter speaks of religion and religious texts as a primary cause of worldwide discrimination against women, he is indicting all so-called major world religions, including Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, and Confucianism. He does not mention indigenous religions, many of which are not patriarchal or not as patriarchal as the major traditions are. When Carter discusses specifics, he focuses on Biblical religions, as I will here. This should not be understood to imply that the other major religions are any less culpable, only that it is beyond the scope of a single essay to analyze all of them.

I agree with Carter that warfare is one of the main causes of the abuse of women and girls. War plays an important part in the oppression of women and girls because rape and slavery have been and continue to be "an ordinary part of war." As wars continue and increase, the rape of women and girls—in many cases brutal, sometimes fatal gang rape—continues. Moreover, the sexual slavery known as trafficking of women and girls, flourishes in the wake of war, as women fleeing war-torn homelands are targeted, tricked, and sold into forced prostitution. If the idea that rape and slavery have always been part of war sounds strange to you, I call your attention to the founding work of western culture, the Iliad: set during the Trojan War, its plot turns on the dispute between Agamemnon and Achilles about which of them has the right to hold a woman from Lesbos named Briseis as his "spear captive," a scholarly euphemism for rape victim and sexual slave. In their conquest of Canaan, the Hebrew people reportedly killed the men and took the women and children as slaves, raping the women as the right of the victors to "the spoils of war." Some were astonished to learn a few decades ago that Serbian soldiers routinely raped Bosnian women, but they should not have been, because rape in war had already been widely reported in Africa. One of the lesser known crimes of the Second World War is the widespread rape of German women fleeing Russian armies occupying territories that became part of the Soviet Union. As horrible as it is, rape as a part of war is not the only reason to call warfare one of the major causes of the abuse of women. Soldiers bring the violence of war...