Vatican Newspaper: 'Only Gender Equity Can Make Violence Against Women Disappear'

ROME — An article in Thursday’s L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s daily newspaper, calls for gender equity, including rights over “their own bodies” as the only path to overcoming violence toward women.

Violence against women “will continue to be a tragic reality,” states the article by Anna Lisa Antonucci, “as long as women’s work is not be paid the same as that of men, as long as women do not have the same career opportunities as men, as long as it is difficult for women to achieve positions of responsibility in society and institutions, without the need for ‘pink quotas,’ and as long as childcare is not equally distributed between parents, but continues to be a duty of the mother to whom the ‘generous’ father offers a hand.”

The article, titled “Only gender equity can make violence against women disappear,” declares that every day around the world 137 women lose their lives at the hand of a family member, “whether father, brother, companion, or husband.”

Sustainable development, which demands that no one be left behind, can only come about in “a world where women have the same rights and opportunities as men, where men and women enjoy equal pay for work of equal value and share family responsibilities in their homes,” it insists.

It can only happen in a world “where the presence of women in political leadership is equal to that of men, as well as in classrooms, corporate meeting rooms and workplaces, and women participate in decisions that affect their lives, bodies, policies and the environment, both in villages and cities,” it continues.

And finally, it can only come about in a world “where girls are not afraid to go home late at night and men are not trapped in oppressive masculinities, so only in a world that has finally achieved gender equity can violence against women be erased,” it concludes.

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