Spike in violence against women

Breaking a glass ceiling was the election of the first coloured American-Indian woman Kamala Harris as the Vice-President of the United States. She was the first coloured American woman to be elected to the country’s second-highest post and with the presidential candidate Joe Biden she polled more than 80 million votes—a record in American Presidential Election history. 

With the President-elect Biden being 78 years old he holds a record of becoming the oldest person to be elected as the President of the most powerful country in the world. Many analysts have expressed doubt whether Mr Biden would contest the next Presidential Election in 2024 when he will be 82 years old.

If he does not contest the widely respected Kamala Harris—who was a US Senator, Chief State Prosecutor and the Attorney General of the largest state of California—most analysts believe Ms Harris will have a good chance of becoming the first coloured woman President of the US. This is largely because the Democratic Party’s rival the Republican Party’s highest level elected representatives had stood by or been silent about the pathological lies publicly told by the outgoing President Donald Trump, who appears to be suffering from truth decay as does his main supporter media tycoon Rupert Murdoch whose multimedia empire is seen by many independent analysts as the Fake News Corp.

Though the US Presidential Election took place on November 3 it was authenticated only on November 25 by the US General Services Administration but even on the Thanksgiving Day on November 26, the outgoing President Trump was making baseless allegations that the Election was rigged, that there were large scale frauds in the polling and counting systems and therefore the Election was illegitimate. But most independent analysts say the election was free and fair. So did the Trump-appointed Chief Federal Election Officials who said that the election was secure and safe last week. Mr Trump fired him for telling the truth. Many other top officials have also been fired because they did or could not agree with Mr Trump, who says he wants to make America great again but apparently tried to make himself great again to boost his ego and self-centred nature. 

With Kamala Harris rising to the second-highest position and various groups like the #MeToo and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) Movements making steady progress, the gender gap is still wide not only in the US but all over the world as also is the horror of violence against women. 

On November 25, the United Nations marked the international day for the elimination of violence against women. 
In a statement headline  “The shadow pandemic” the world body says “Since the outbreak of COVID-19, emerging data and reports from those on the front lines, have shown that all types of violence against women and girls, particularly domestic violence, have intensified. 

The UN says we need a global effort to stop this shadow pandemic. As COVID-19 cases continue to strain health services, essential services, such as domestic violence shelters and helplines, have reached capacity. 

More needs to be done to prioritize addressing violence against women in COVID-19 response and recovery efforts.

In a sub-topic titled Orange the World: Fund, Respond, Prevent, Collect, the UN says as countries implemented lockdown measures to stop the spread of the COVID-19 virus, violence against women, especially domestic violence, intensified – in some countries, calls to Helplines have increased five-fold.

The UN women website says that on November 25 it launched a 16-day campaign for activism against gender-based violence. As the world retreated inside homes due to the lockdown measures introduced to curb the COVID-19 pandemic, reports showed an alarming increase in the already existing pandemic of violence against women. 

UN General Secretary António Guterres in a statement says accompanying the Covid- 19 crisis has been a spike in domestic violence reporting, at exactly the time that services, including rule of law, health and shelters, are being diverted to address the pandemic. 

We could make a difference during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and protracted state of crisis it has generated across the world. We also could support women and girl survivors of violence to stay safe and free of violence.