The author writes, “The Goren family are Muslims, but it isn’t just a Muslim problem – extreme and violent misogyny is a blight on other Asian communities in Britain, too…”

I’m shocked by the ignorance of that statement! Misogyny and violence against women, even within the family, is a HUGE problem for women of all races in the West. I live in Alberta, Canada and my province has a tiny Asian community, but the highest reported rates of domestic battery in the whole country. Apparently our country has one of the industrialized world’s highest rates of sexual assault. In my own experience as a feminist activist in Calgary, Alberta, I have spoken to woman after woman who has experienced violence in the family.

In fact, those of us who regularly speak to survivors of sexual assault know that for most women, their first experiences of abuse happen within their own homes, perpetrated most often by close family members.

When they try to leave their families without any support they often find it difficult to manage financially by themselves, and so their poverty increases their vulnerability to violence. I have a white friend, for example, whose landlord would rape her, but because she couldn’t find a cheaper apartment, she was too scared to say anything. The same girl eventually turned to prostitution so she could make enough money to move to a better apartment and of course, in the illegal sex trade women are also sometimes raped or beaten (usually by rich white men who think poor women deserve it) and have no recourse because how can you go to the cops when what you’re doing is illegal?

Someone commented after Ceri Radford’s article that if indeed social problems exist within the West, then we should stop the immigration of Muslim or Asian peoples because they’re just adding to the problem. I believe the exact quote was,

“Do you think we haven’t got enough home-grown feral rat children, wife beaters, child abusers, serial philanderers, pimps, crack dealers, twoccers** and other miscellaneous lowlife scumbags that we have to import them from this, that or t’other Third-World hellhole?”

In this analysis, there’s an underlying assumption that these problem people (feral rat children, wife beaters, child abusers, serial philanderers, pimps, crack dealers, twoccers and other miscellaneous lowlife scumbags) somehow emerged IN SPITE of this great and glorious enlightened society we’ve created in the West. It’s the “bad apple” theory–our society is superior BUT there’s a few bad apples.

Those of us on the front lines of this war against women see things differently.

Violence against women flourishes in any society where violence goes unrecognized, and where it is maintained by women’s poverty.

As long as we think family violence is an Asian problem, or a Muslim problem, or something we imported from the East, we ignore the overwhelming evidence that violence against women the West is a daily struggle for the vast majority of us. Some women may be shaking their heads thinking, “No, not me.” But the mere fact that so many of us are afraid to walk alone at night, or that we accept violence against women in the sex trade as inevitable, or that most of us know at least one woman who’s experienced rape would indicate that you are aware that its dangerous being a woman.

And as long as we get paid less than men for the same work, shoulder an unequal share of household and care-taking responsibilities, and can’t afford the necessities of life on our meagre single-woman incomes, we will have to continue to tolerate the violence in our homes, workplaces, and streets because our poverty forces us to rely on men, even when they abuse us.

I can’t believe our government and media keep telling us the West is exporting women’s liberation to Iraq and Afghanistan when they’re shutting down shelters and cutting funding to social support programs for women here. At the same time, American and Canadian-backed corporations are providing the financing and weaponry for governments all over the world (Iraq, Sudan, Israel, South America) to target civilians (or “insurgents”) while women in these countries (and many in the West, too!) lack access to proper healthcare, housing, education, and nutrition.