Women in Third World Countries

How much do you really know about the pain and suffering of women in third world countries? Every day, women die from the conditions and requirements they are put through. Women are not even close to being treated as equals. In parts of India, Kenya, Pakistan, and several other nations, the rights of women are almost nonexistent.

Women in India are completely stripped of all rights. Every day, they are forced to exploit their bodies to men and are sometimes even kept in a locked room. In addition, according to cbsnews.com, India has the highest sex trafficking and prostitution rates in the world, and women all over the country are put through captivity, beatings, and rape. As a result, foeticide (fetal execution) and infanticide are extremely high as well. Consequently, nearly fifty million females have gone missing in the past century.

According to globalslaveryindex.org, even at ten years old, young girls are hired in private homes to work at which they may be sexually and physically abused. While the legal age of marriage in India is 18, over fifty percent of women are married before that, most of whom are forced. They are treated more like tools than they are women.

In Kenya, for women of the Maasai tribe, the suffering starts even as young girls. According to the Women Like Us Foundation, for most Maasai girls, their families usually do not think that they need an education. In fact, it is a tradition to marry them off to men. As tradition follows, the girls must undergo female genital mutilation (FGM) in order to not seem promiscuous. This is generally done with an unsterilized blade which greatly increases their risk for contracting HIV, of which there is a large breakout. Some girls even bleed to death. Their parents do not want to take them to the hospital because they would have to go to jail for doing this to their own child. However, if the girls do survive, they are forced to marry men much older than themselves. It is rare for Maasai girls to ever pursue further education.

Pakistan is on the more murderous side of women’s rights. Forced marriage comes up again in this country, but refusals can be deadly. Human Rights Watch reported that around twenty-one percent of girls marry before age 18, with the majority of marriages being forced. Some cases reported that when women refused to marry, they were burned, beaten, attacked with acid, or even killed. This used to be legal in Pakistan as long as the murderer was family, but now it is just a poorly enforced law. These are called “honor killings” and there are an estimated 1,000 of them annually.

While all of these women may seem entirely helpless, there are ways to alleviate what they undergo. They can be provided food, shelter, and even be rescued from their current situations through missionaries that are willing to travel and lend a helping hand. There are many foundations and organizations that can provide support to these women. For these third-world countries, women continue to suffer. Attempting to survive, with the little dignity they have, they sometimes never realize that they do not deserve what they are going through.