Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Cape Town (Fides Service)- Women are the main victims of the proliferation of firearms in South Africa according to a report presented in South Africa on the occasion of International Women’s Day, yesterday. The report ‘Impact of Guns of Women’s Lives’ compiled by Amnesty International, the development agency Oxfam, and the global International Action Network on Small Arms, said women were paying an increasingly heavy price for the unregulated multibillion-dollar trade in small arms.
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To realise the gravity of the situation it is enough to think that in South Africa a woman is shot dead by a current or former partner every 18 hours and in France and in South Africa one out of three of women killed by her husband is shot dead. The report said women suffer direct and indirect repercussions of the 650 million small arms in the world.
It pointed out that in countries such as Canada and Australia, which introduced new laws to restrict possession of firearms, there was a drastic fall in the number of murders.
Among the proposals put forward by the report: people found guilty of domestic violence should be banned from obtaining a gun licence; violence against women with real punishment for offenders and compensation for the victims should be included in penal codes; an international treaty should be adopted to ban the export of arms in cases of evident risk of the arms being used for violence against women or the violation of other human rights.
The Comboni missionary sisters have launched on their web site Femmis a campaign to increase awareness with regard to violence against women which they say must be recognised as a “crime against humanity”. The missionaries recall the situation of women in Africa, victims of armed guerrilla groups in Democratic Congo, Uganda and Sudan. (L.M.) (Agenzia Fides 9/3/2005 righe 28 parole 328)
