Jesus spent a lot of time talking to women. He apparently enjoyed their company and he inspired them to be followers of his new ideas. The Bible doesn’t tell of their missionary work but I can’t help but think that women played as important a role as Peter, John, Thomas, Philip, Paul and all the others. Jesus valued women. That has always meant a lot to me in my faith walk. I wonder what Jesus would do in the situation we face in our world today?
Last week the RCMP gave an early look at a document that will be released later this year regarding the missing and murdered aboriginal women in Canada. Over 1000 women have gone missing since 1980. NDP status of women critic Niki Ashton said the newly confirmed number is shocking.”If you put it into context, it means that over the last 30 years, 40 aboriginal women and girls didn’t — every year — did not come home to see their families,” she said to Rosemary Barton on CBC News Network’s Power & Politics.”
On the same program, Liberal health critic Hedy Fry added that it isn’t about how many women there are at all.”The fact is, at that rate, if there were other kinds of women, other than aboriginal women, missing or murdered in this country, there would be an outcry. There would be an inquiry, there would be something,” Fry said.
According to the RCMP statement, the newly confirmed data was compiled with the assistance of Statistics Canada from close to 300 individual police jurisdictions in Canada and shows an over-representation of missing and murdered aboriginal women in police databases. It also included the point that while aboriginal women make up four per cent of Canada’s population, they represent 16 per cent of all murdered females between 1980 and 2012, as well as 12 per cent of all missing females on record.
I was stunned when I heard this report last week. This week I am learning about the more than 200 girls that were abducted from their school in Nigeria. Taken by the extremist Islamic group Boko Haram, their leader Abubakar Shekau, spoke in a video to claim the group’s involvement and said that the girls would be sold. As he put it, “There is a market for selling girls.” In the video, Shekau also claims God commanded him to sell the girls.
I feel such despair for those young women, caught in violence, cut down for seeking an education, seen as worthless except for the money they might bring in their selling or for the momentary release they might bring in a rape. It sickens me. How could some men so distort the balance between gender? How could they attribute such perversion to God?
Sometimes it feels like the world is spinning towards destruction and not only will the women be killed first they will also blamed for its demise. It is a sad, sad situation and I find it hard to reconcile.
