Washington: The general opinion in the debate of the International Conference on Religious Freedom held in Washington is that women who belong to minority groups everywhere in the world are victims of exploitation. Caste, religion, gender and economic distinctions are the norm in it and most of the participants in the debate said.
“When we talk about persecution of religious minority women and girls, we always talk about double vulnerability,” Dr. Ewelina U. Ochab, a human rights lawyer and the co-founder of Coalition for Genocide Response, told CNA. “Vulnerability because of their religion or belief and, in addition, vulnerability because of their gender.”
These women, simply because they are women, face horrors from rape and forced marriage to forced birth control and sterilization. This type of persecution is not a product of the past; rather, it is ongoing.
Christian women in Nigeria; the Rohingyas; the Yazidis, an ethnic-religious minority in Iraq are some of the minority communities subject to exploitation. Some also pointed to the suffering of women and girls in countries such as Pakistan, Afghanistan and Ukraine.
David Alton — a British parliamentarian, human-rights advocate, and lifelong Catholic — compared these women to those “at the foot of the cross” who refused to flee.
Many of these advocates called for assistance for these tortured women, while, at the same time, urging that perpetrators should be held accountable to prevent future atrocities.
“In general, when we talk about kind of gender and genocide, we tend to minimize or overlook the experiences of women and girls,” Naomi Kikoler, the director of the Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide said, adding that women and girls experience persecution “in a very particular and acute way.”
As an example, she pointed to Yazidi women suffering from sexual violence committed by the ISIS.
These perpetrators “are intentionally targeting women for these acts of violence because they're trying to change the future of those communities,” she said. “They're trying to ensure that future Yazidi children are no longer Yazidi, but that they will be of a different faith.”
Azra Jafari, the first and only female mayor in Afghanistan, said to CNA about the religious persecution that women face.
“Unfortunately, most of the time women in religious countries always are bounded by the name of the religious,” she said. “Every bounding, rule, law, or regulation that they put on women in religious countries, they excuse it as the religion. So, they don't want women be in charge.”
She pointed to her life as an example of introducing change, despite being discriminated against as both a woman and a Hazara.
Another woman belonging to a minority group, Pari Ibrahim, spoke about the persecution of her people. A Yazidi, Ibrahim pointed to when the Islamic State arrived to “eradicate” the Yazidis of nothern Iraq in August 2014.
“The men were killed immediately and then the women had to suffer more and are still till this day suffering,” the founder and executive director of the Free Yezidi Foundation said.
-CNA