Amnesty International has come out with a comprehensive and [typically] disappointing report on the state of women in Russia. While the domestic abuse figures are staggering, the response is founded on the usual bureaucratic gobbledygook that criminalises behaviour that the very culture unwittingly promotes.
Think on't: poverty has been rampant, atheism was imposed for decades, the few who had jobs were squashed in untenable living arrangements, and each couple procured between 5 and 15 abortions easily in the course of their fertile years. (Poor access to contraceptives made abortion the contraceptive of choice.) Now, added to the darkness is the relatively new access to the materialism of the West, widespread alcoholism, and generations of dysfunction.
AI has the audacity to suggest that, while there was domestic violence before the socialist revolution, there was little abuse in the Soviet Union because of the "equality of the sexes" during that time. What laughable nonsense -- even by the words of Marx himself, who was contemptuous of women. Then consider their own statistic:
90 per cent of all respondents had either witnessed scenes of domestic psychological violence between their parents, or had experienced it in their current relationship.
Remember, the parent's would have been of the Soviet generation. And yet the study opines:
22). According to the myth of the family as a sanctuary of tranquillity and harmony, domestic violence is a veritable incongruity, a contradiction in terms. Violence shatters the peaceful image of the home, the safety that kinship provides. None the less, the insidious nature of domestic violence has been documented across nations and cultures worldwide. It is a universal phenomenon [italics in original].
You know where this is leading, Gentle Reader. The family simply has to go since it is the cause of the problem. Any evidence of "good families" is a myth. Many solutions are offered -- more help lines, reformation of the police so they don't turn a blind eye, gender neutral courts who can help women out of marriages, ratification of CEDAW at the UN, etc.
Imagine bringing to the table the Christian teaching on the family, in which the spouses are called to mutual submission and the husband, especially, is taught to reject the natural inclination from the Fall, which causes him to lord his strength over his wife and to subject her to indignities. Imagine teaching NFP as a way to space children and for couples to reverence their child-bearing capacity, which the State bullied out of them years ago.
Imagine studying how the State diminished the dignity of fatherhood in general so that husbands' manhood was threatened at every turn, and they took out their frustrations on those closest to them. The police were never a reliable help for anyone, conscription in the army added to men's trauma, those who spent time in prison learned even worse behaviours, so what surprise is it that women are now trapped with abusive men.
Rather than finding the source of this violence, AI has turned on the very institutions (the Church and the family) which have the only possibility of saving the very refuge that women and children need. If men were allowed to know God the Father, they would not pattern their fatherhood on their own fathers and the reprehensible State which abused everyone for so long.
Alcoholism is an enormous problem in and of itself. It complicates everything, but AI hasn't set that apart. Twelve step programs -- with their stellar track record -- are not something the UN or AI seem to want to promote -- perhaps the Higher Power inherent to it cuts into their own Power Base. This is a difficult and complex culture which needs massive and deep healing, but this document doesn't come close to finding that. Secular answers won't satisfy the human heart and its need for love and acceptance. Very sad.
Comments