Do You Know?

Four of every five women in Pakistan face some form of domestic abuse, says a strategy paper. Source:  Published in The Express Tribune, March 2nd, 2011.

Majority of mind set says that, ‘Women are for sex, cooking and house work’. The root causes of this problem are; illiteracy, unawareness of spiritual teachings, reluctance to follow ethical/moral values, false practices of olden days, dominancy mind-set, use of alcohol/drugs and unemployment etc. (Source: CGDC Rural Rapid Survey in Sindh).

The big problem about VAW is that no one talks about it. Mostly women feel reluctant to share what’s happening to them as they feel threatened and afraid to face more violence. They also feel shame of being abused and often double minded by false justifications by male for doing abuse with them.

CGDC is creating an alliance of 40 organizations to speak up jointly to denounce violence against women. As of June 2012 we have 12 organizations on board and it’s just one month we have launched the project.

The alliance will jointly hold awareness meeting at different place all over the country, use many different pictorial and interactive publications and plan advocacy initiatives together. CGDC believes that silence protects the violent. But together, we act to restore relationships and prevent violence against women. The alliance activity will serve around 2000 beneficiaries directly and around 8000 indirectly.

CGDC also plans to hold a national conference by end of this year on violence against women.