The CBE Scroll

It’s wonderful, and perhaps all too rare, when countries realize their mistakes and take steps to correct them. China Daily reports that the imbalance between the numbers of boys and girls in China is growing so severe that if left unchecked there will be 25 million men in China between 2015 and 2030 with no hope of finding a mate.

Many Chinese parents abort the wife’s pregnancy if tests show the fetus is female so that they can try again for a boy. As a result, there are 119 boys born for every 100 girls in China; the rest of the world averages between 103 and 107 boys for 100 girls.

But China has stepped up legal action and has prosecuted 3,000 cases of gender selective abortion for non-medical purposes over the past two years.

China’s State Population and Family Planning Commission’s (SCPFP) three-year-old “Care for Girls” program offers hope that the imbalance can be corrected by providing social benefits, including cash payments, to families with only girls, in order to boost the status of girls and women. The program has significantly reduced the boys-to-girls ratio in the 21 counties that ran the pilot program. The SCPFP will now extend the program to all provincial regions.

Population Research Institute reports that over a hundred million baby girls in China have died by abortion, infanticide, abandonment and neglect since the beginning of China’s one-child policy in 1981.

Families in other countries are now adopting abandoned Chinese baby girls to do what they can to rescue these precious children of God.

Poverty and injustice discriminate. And the health and well-being of women around the world suffer because of it. Many of us who live in privilege do not worry about their daughters being raped during war or being forced into prostitution. Many of us who live in privilege do not think about injustice and inequality at all, because it doesn’t seem to be a necessary or pressing concern. We are in a place to make the choice between apathy and becoming aware. But the vast majority of people who live in poverty do not have that choice to make, because the structures that surround them or the people who are in power over them have already made another choice: to force their advantage.

I do not mean to deny the agency of people living in poverty, no, far from that. What I do mean to do is to ask why injustices, largely against women and children, are allowed and at times even encouraged. I mean to ask what systemic and theoretical structures exist that perpetuate harmful perceptions and actions about and against certain groups of people?

Why do women form the majority of heterosexual cases of HIV/AIDS? A number of factors might explain the growing number of women who are infected with the virus. In many places, girls are pressured to be married young, often to older, more experienced men who may already have multiple wives. Typically, these girls also live in places where educational and economic opportunities for them as women are extremely limited. Even if they are fortunate enough to know about the danger of HIV/AIDS, their cultural tradition may not protect their rights or provide them the choice to either abstain from sex or request to use a condom if they suspect their partner is infected. In areas of political unrest, many women are raped in war crimes, being made susceptible to HIV infection against their own will.

Direct correlations can be made between the spread of HIV/AIDS and human trafficking, particularly sexual trafficking. Women who have been abducted into the illegal sex industry do not have the choice of whom they will be with, and are often at risk for violent sex. Many people who are trafficked are lured with the false promise of a good job or an educational prospect. Once in captivity, many are brought across borders where they know no one and do not speak the language. They are isolated from outside contact and warned not to plan escape; threats are made against them and their families in order to maintain submission. Because of the coercion and deception involved, the estimated 12.3 million people who have been trafficked are considered victims of modern-day slavery. Lest the question arises of how so many fall for “too good to be true” offers, it should be recognized that the hopelessness of poverty breeds desperation and an ambition to do anything that might make life better.

In speaking of the vulnerable, we might also consider the millions of young girls who undergo what is commonly labeled “female circumcision.” However, circumcision is probably not an accurate term, considering the health risks involved and the pain that it causes in sexual intercourse, childbirth, and even urination. For this reason, the practice is more appropriately called female genital mutilation, or female genital cutting/modification, out of respect for those who have had the procedure done. While it is practiced for a number of different reasons, including as a rite of passage, most cultures that perform the cutting acknowledge that it is done in order to control a woman’s sexual desire and keep her chaste.

The work of many organizations that directly fight injustice is essential in these times. So also, is the work of CBE. It is especially relevant for vulnerable women living in poor countries, because the last thing that those who are living in situations of oppression need from the church is more male hierarchy. If the church promotes patriarchy, then what could ever free these women from the injustice in which they are caught? If the church excuses, and even advocates for hierarchy, then the church may have little theological or theoretical basis upon which to call into question the structures of injustice that women face all over the world because of their gender. Patriarchy is incompatible with justice for women.

Injustices against women are not just isolated incidents; rather, they result from many societal and even theological factors. These are interconnected issues, linked by the views that many around the world hold that women are second best, meant to be dominated or needing to be controlled by men. CBE is necessary in order to set a precedent of dignity and equality of women and men in places where people of privilege live, as well as, and perhaps even more urgently, where people live in poverty, desperation, and vulnerability.

So how can those who lead lives of privilege stand by and claim ignorance or apathy? Will they? Or will they — will you and I — do what we can with the gifts, tools and influence that we have in order to change the minds of those in power, change the structures that oppress, and change the lives of the hurting?

Being an Agent of Change
Step 1: Educate yourself about injustice against women.
Step 2: Tell others.
Step 3: Support organizations that do the work.

Available resources for education:

Good News About Injustice, by Gary Haugen
Cut Flowers: Female Genital Mutilation and a Biblical Response, by Sandy Willcox
“Sexual Exploitation and Violence toward Women: Global and Local Concerns,” recording by Ellen Armstrong
“Helping Christians Set Trends for Oppressed Women in India,” recording by Ellen Alexander & Beulah Wood
“Sexual Trafficking, Prostitution, and the Global Sex Industry,” recording by Lisa Thompson
World Hope International

Leah

Editor’s note: This is a condensed summary of Leah’s “As We Speak” lecture series, originally presented at Cornerstone Music Festival, July 6th, 7th, and 8th, 2006. She addressed injustice against women in the topics of HIV/AIDS, Human Trafficking, and Female Genital Mutilation.

There is an excellent article on godswordtowomen.org called, “Empirical Data in Support of Egalitarian Marriages and A Fresh Perspective on Submission and Authority,” that reviews many scientific studies that all say that marriages that operate on the basis of equality are much more healthy than those that are hierarchical — in fact that hierarchical approaches actually harm marriages.

The research reviewed include studies by the following professionals who work within the fields of marriage and family therapy, sociology, and demography:

• A 2001 Barna Research Group survey of Christian denominations.
• Dr. Howard Clinebell, Professor Emeritus of Pastoral Psychology and Counseling, Claremont School of Theology
• Drs. Alan Booth and Paul Amato, Penn State sociologists and demographers
• Dr. David H. Olson, Professor Emeritus, Family Social Science, University of Minnesota
• Drs. David H. Olson and Shuji G. Asai of the University of Minnesota
• Dr. Diana R. Garland, Professor and Chair of the School of Social Work and Director of the Center for Family and Community Ministries at Baylor University
• Drs. Pepper Schwartz and Philip Blumstein, University of Washington sociologists

In his summary of these studies’ findings, Rev. Preato says the following:

Over the last 50 years these studies reveal that significant numbers of egalitarian marriages are happy in comparison to traditional hierarchical marriages. A recent study quantified these results revealing that over 80% of egalitarian marriages are happy while less than 20% of traditional marriages can say the same. That represents over a 4:1 ratio in favor of egalitarian marriages. Spousal abuse continues to be more than 300 percent higher in traditional marriages than in egalitarian marriages.

These research studies accomplish the following: First, they effectively discredit any traditionalists’ notion that dismantling hierarchy destabilizes marriage and that the root problem in marriage is the unwillingness of each spouse to accept the role for which he or she was designed. Second, they prove that hierarchy actually destabilizes and harms marriages. Third, they provide objective data that egalitarian marriages produce the healthiest, happiest, most intimate, and stable of all marriage relationships with the least amount of spousal abuse.

The point being made here is not that CBE is out for more “women’s rights” or is trying to upset the “traditional” ways of church and home. We are trying to save marriage and to help churches be more responsible, accurate and wise in the advice they give to husbands and wives. If this comes to pass, the impact of it will far surpass the fact that more women break through the glass ceiling in countless churches.

One of the problems with developing a concern (or anger!) over biblical equality is that it can hang over you like a cloud and drag you down in the dumps, make you feel moody, put other people out of sorts against you. How much more safe and sane to just attend your sweet little evangelical church, don’t make waves, and float in the old familiar music and words. But is that right? As Hope said so well on my blog [permission sought and granted]:

I feel frustrated for being grieved about this too. I keep waiting for it to pass. I think, I’ll get over it, forgive and forget. It won’t bug me, etc.. hasn’t happened yet in the last 2 years. If anything, it’s intensified. I heard Hybels of Willow Creek talk on a topic called ‘holy discontent’. He said, if there is some issue out there that you can’t lose, there is probably a reason. It’s your ‘holy discontent’. God wants you to use it to do something. Don’t let it embitter you, use it for his glory. So, I rest in that. Perhaps it’s not so awful that the issue is staying with me. Perhaps it will make me more sensitive to people who are oppressed, judged, stereotyped. Perhaps, it will make me a better Christian.

Jon Trott has a recent posting of his struggle with anger in a post called Cornerstone Festival and Christians for Biblical Equality and he says it quite well:

In my own case, my anger seems more often to end in something destructive, esp. when I think I’m right about something. But after listening to Sarah, and then during Q and A offering what I (and not Julia, so she doesn’t get in trouble) called “the evangelical enablement of a rape culture,” I was left thinking about anger’s positive aspects. As one friend (a woman pastor, appropriately!) told me later after listening to my reflections, William Barclay writes regarding Jesus’ words on anger in the Sermon on the Mount that (her words), “When we are angry on behalf of someone else, there’s a much better chance that anger is constructive, godly anger, than when we’re angry on behalf of ourselves.” Yes, something like that.

How hard it is to think of others. But if we do, we not only satisfy Jesus’ command to love our neighbor, but we also better channel our anger. God might even change it to joy because we’ll be in the center of His will along with our holy discontent.

In a Wall Street Journal article today, “He, Once a She, Offers Own View On Science Spat” [July 13, 2006; p. B1], Sharon Begley reports that Dr. Ben Barres has a specially unique viewpoint on the issue of whether women make good scientists. Barres, in today’s issue of Nature, strongly disagrees with the “Larry Summers Hypothesis,” named for the former Harvard president who attributed the paucity of top women scientists to “lack of intrinsic aptitude” since he’s been able to view the situation from both sides of the gender fence.

Begley:

Ben Barres had just finished giving a seminar at the prestigious Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research 10 years ago, describing to scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard and other top institutions his discoveries about nerve cells called glia. As the applause died down, a friend later told him, one scientist turned to another and remarked what a great seminar it had been, adding, “Ben Barres’s work is much better than his sister’s.”

There was only one problem. Prof. Barres, then as now a professor of neurobiology at Stanford University, doesn’t have a sister in science. The Barbara Barres the man remembered was Ben.

In high school, Barbara was steered away from MIT despite being the top math and science student, and at MIT was told that her boyfriend must have solved a particularly difficult math problem when she was the only student that could solve it. Neither could she get hardly any of the lab heads to work with her on her thesis, while her equally adept male friends had their pick of labs.

Begley again:

There is little evidence that lack of testosterone or anything unique to male biology is the main factor keeping women from the top ranks of science and math, says Prof. Barres, a view that is widely held among scientists who study the issue. Although more men than women in the U.S. score in the stratosphere on math tests, there is no such difference in Japan, and in Iceland the situation is flipped, with more women than men scoring at the very top.

All this makes a lot of sense to my wife who is also a scientist (MD) and who also was the top science student at her university. When all the stereotypes just don’t apply to you, you have to discount the purveyors of the lies and look around for other explanations. Let alone working hard to follow up on the options that seem to work best for you.