44 Asia The EconomistOctober 12th 2019
2Banyan A history of violence
I
n september awoman called police to
tell them that the Speaker of Nepal’s
parliament, Krishna Bahadur Mahara,
had just drunkenly assaulted her in her
flat. When, according to local media
reports, she later withdrew her allegation
in the face of threats and pressure, every-
thing seemed to be following the usual
South Asian script. Men, especially
powerful ones, rarely have to answer for
their actions. Then the unand foreign
embassies put out a statement urging the
government to take a stand on violence
against women. Within days, Mr Mahara
had stepped down. This week the police
arrested him.
Whether this case will count as pro-
gress in the abysmal treatment of women
in his part of the world will not be clear
for some time. Violence against women
need not hold back a man going places. A
tally in India last year found 48 members
of parliament or state assemblies ac-
cused or convicted of violent crimes
against females. They included members
of parties run by women.
In South Asia the mistreatment starts
in the womb, with the selective abortion
of girls. It continues after birth. Girls are
likelier to die before the age of five or
drop out of school. Many marry before
they are adults or are beaten by their
partners. In the five years to 2015 over
40,000 Indian women died in rows over
dowries. That is more than the combined
deaths over the same period from con-
flict in Kashmir, insurrection in the
north-east and the Naxalite rebellion.
Laws and social attitudes have
evolved, but not enough. The brutal
gang-rape and murder in 2012 of a stu-
dent in Delhi galvanised India’s middle
classes, but the rape of women and girls
in villages attracts little attention.
Most sex crimes everywhere go unre-ported, so all statistics about them should
be treated with caution. But for what it is
worth, the unsays Asia and the Pacific
have the worst rates of violence against
women, with two in three women experi-
encing it in their lifetime.
Discrimination is rampant. This year
Indonesia’s Supreme Court found a former
teacher guilty of “violating decency” by
making a lewd recording. She had taped
her boss making sexually explicit com-
ments to her, hoping to prove that he was
harassing her. Her ordeal ended only with
a presidential pardon. Female police offi-
cers and army recruits are sometimes
required to submit to outrageous physical
inspections to “prove” their virginity.
In China abusive marriages are com-
mon, and hard to escape (see China sec-
tion). Activists against harassment are
themselves harassed by the state. In Cam-
bodia women’s safety is not helped by the
media. A third of television dramas depict
physical, sexual or emotional abuse of
women. Such problems are not confined
to poor countries. South Korea’s k-pop
industry has been roiled by a series ofcases in which women were drugged and
raped. Then there are the thousands of
spycams detected each year in women’s
lavatories and changing rooms, for
which hardly anyone is prosecuted.
Recently, a hospital worker killed herself
after discovering that a video of her
changing into her scrubs had been wide-
ly distributed. Reported sex crimes,
including child rape, are up sharply in
Bangladesh, though this might simply
reflect a greater willingness to report
such things.
Across Asia women are finding a
voice. In Bangladesh a #MeToo-style
movement is growing in the country’s
garment factories (though the move-
ment’s leaders still struggle to convince
victims to file complaints with the po-
lice). In January lawyers in Pakistan
launched an online portal called Ab Aur
Nahin (“Time’s up”) offering pro bono
help for victims of harassment.
In the Philippines women have taken
to social media and the streets to com-
plain about President Rodrigo Duterte’s
frequent jokes about rape and groping—a
rare case of people standing up to the
strongman. And in South Korea more
women are speaking up against pow-
erful, violent men in government, busi-
ness and entertainment.
They are also, in a “corset-free” move-
ment, challenging the country’s rigid
beauty standards, exemplified by em-
ployers’ expectation that women should
be heavily made-up at work and, at some
firms, not even wear glasses. The emer-
gence in South Korea of an aggressive,
mainly online force of young men who
believe that such movements are proof of
the oppression of men is an indication of
how long and how hard the battle for
security, let alone equality, will be for
Asian women.The struggle of Asian women not to be abusedporeans to “defer non-essential travel” to
Hong Kong.
The Straits Times, a pro-government pa-
per, would have felt no embarrassment
about its story on a ban on rallies in Singa-
pore in support of the protesters in Hong
Kong, on a day of solidarity demonstra-
tions in a number of cities worldwide. The
headline read, “Anti-totalitarianism day:
No permits for Singapore assemblies”. One
protester in Hong Kong, apparently a Sin-
gaporean, sparked a fiery debate on social
media with a photo of himself holding a
placard reading: “Don’t let Hong Kong belike Singapore, where people live in fear.”
Pro-government commentators in Sin-
gapore were quick to condemn him. Even
many critics of the government thought he
was exaggerating. But, hard though it is to
gauge public opinion, a survey in July sug-
gested that 75% of Singaporeans sympa-
thised with the protesters in Hong Kong.
Writing last month in the Hong Kong
Free Press, an online journal, Kirsten Han,
an independent Singaporean journalist,
guessed that the percentage has probably
fallen sharply since then. Leslie Fong, a for-
mer editor of the Straits Times, wrote in theSouth China Morning Post, a Hong Kong pa-
per, of the sorrow many of his compatriots
feel “at the sad spectacle of a city smother-
ing itself in full global view”.
Many Singaporeans, Ms Han noted, be-
lieve the argument that Hong Kong’s lead-
ers have been making, that the protests are
really about economic gripes, such as unaf-
fordable housing, rather than politics. That
ignores the genuine frustration of many in
Hong Kong at a political system in which
only certain voices seem to be heard. It is a
frustration that some in Singapore, despite
its very different system, also feel. 7