U.N. Links Poverty, Violence Against Women

There's only one reason to keep women as second-class citizens in any part of our modern world; because they are threat to your hold on power.

Whether it's the Saudi Royal family or some strong arm in Africa, if your hold on power is tenuous then you have to do what you can to control your population and make less likely to revolt. One way to do that is to keep at least half of your population illiterate and in abject poverty. That's the plight of many women around the world. It's obviously an awful shame and more should be done to stop it but then, more should be done to stop genocide and we all know how good the UN is at stopping that.

Here's the article:

The world will never eliminate poverty until it confronts social, economic and physical discrimination against women, the United Nations said Wednesday.

"Gender apartheid" could scuttle the global body's goal of halving extreme poverty by 2015, the U.N. Population Fund's annual State of World Population report said.

"We cannot make poverty history until we stop violence against women and girls," the fund's executive director, Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, said at the report's launch in London. "We cannot make poverty history until women enjoy their full social, cultural, economic and political rights."

The report said gender equality and better reproductive health could save the lives of 2 million women and 30 million children over the next decade - and help lift millions around the world out of poverty. More