OPINION ON SUNDAY: Violence poses largest threat to women today

A FRIEND of mine thought herself lucky. Good job. Nice house. Great looking boyfriend.

Except that every time she left the good job and went home to the great looking boyfriend in the nice house, she worried herself sick about what she was going to find.

She knew that she was going to end up as a punch bag of one kind or another and only hoped he'd hurt her with his angry words and not his fists.

I lost touch with my friend, but she was very clearly on my mind two months ago when Amnesty International launched its campaign, Stop Violence Against Women.

I also thought of Derry woman Anne Donnelly, whose mother was blinded by domestic violence.

I remembered the former boyfriend who cried as he told me how, as a small child, he had spent night after night cowering in his bedroom listening as his father beat his mother. And I wondered if he was still having nightmares.

Violence against women is one of the greatest human rights scandals of our times. It is a killer.

Violence happens to women everywhere. Rich women and poor women. Black women and white women. Protestant women and Catholic women.

Amnesty International has looked at the big picture across the world. From the battlefield to the bedroom, women's lives are in danger.

In the USA, the Surgeon General has warned that domestic violence poses the largest single threat to all women. More than rape, muggings and car accidents combined.

Violence against women affects every single one of us in Northern Ireland.

Almost half of all crimes reported by women to the British Crime Survey were ones of domestic violence, despite the fact that domestic violence is the least likely of all crimes to be reported.

A massive 45 per cent of female murder victims are killed by their partner or former partner. The figure for men is only eight per cent.

Partner-abuse is a factor in one in four suicides by women.

Between April 2002 and March 2003, Northern Ireland saw 15,512 domestic violence incidents. These included seven deaths and 18 attempted murders.

Thousands of women are not safe in their own home. Thousands of children grow up scared for their mother and terrified of their father. Of course men too are victims of domestic violence, but there is no getting away from the fact that eight out of 10 victims of domestic violence are women.

Survey after survey reveals an awful fact: that there is a very high level of tolerance of violence against women in our community.

Approximately one in three adults and young people say that hitting a woman is "ok" some of the time.

Let's get one thing straight. Violence is always a choice. Just because you're a bit cheesed off, you don't decide to thump the boss or tell an employee he's not getting any pay that week. Nothing excuses domestic violence - not being tired, not being drunk, not having had a bad day at work. No woman ever "deserves" to be hit.

Far too many women still suffer in silence. They feel ashamed of themselves - mortified that the man they love can carry on doing this to them.

We all think that this is a private matter. But it is not. It is a crime like any other.

It does not matter if a woman is beaten senseless on the street or in her own home. It is still an outrage and a crime.

In the Autumn the Government will be telling us how it plans to deal with domestic violence in Northern Ireland. Amnesty International will be watching these plans very carefully to make sure they really deal with this problem.

We will be challenging our politicians to make sure that they take this issue seriously. Our politicians have to give a lead and say clearly that violence against women is never normal, legal or acceptable. It should never be tolerated or justified.

Amnesty International is calling on men to get involved in this campaign.

Patrick Corrigan, Amnesty's Programme Director in Northern Ireland says: "By no means is this campaign anti- man. We want as many men as possible to join with us .This is not just a woman's issue. Any man who loves his mother, his sister, his wife or his daughter should be part of the campaign to stop violence against women.

"Amnesty knows that our actions make a difference. We're the largest human rights organisation in the world, with 1.7 million members.

"We have challenged injustices such as torture and disappearances all over the world and changed them.

"Now we are going to challenge this injustice."

As a first step to making change happen, we are asking people to imagine a world without violence against women and girls.

Many people find this hard because they don't even realise how their lives are affected. But we want to ask as many people as possible to tell us what they think the world would be like if violence against women and girls ended.

We need good laws to protect women and girls from violence, but good laws won't be enough on their own.

This campaign is about something more than that.

It is about changing hearts and minds. And we very much hope that you'll want to be part of it.

Further information on the campaign can be found on the Amnesty International website: amnesty.org.uk/ni or contact Patricia Campbell on 028 90 643000.

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